Synesthetes: a Handbook

Home , Chromesthesia, Polish Braille, Richard Cytowic, Synesthesia

Synesthetes: a handbook

by Sean A. Day

All pictures and diagrams used in this publication are either in public domain or are the property of Sean A. Day

ii Dedications

To the following:

Susanne Michaela Wiesner

Midori

Ming-Mei

Cameo

Myrdene Anderson and subscribers to the Synesthesia List, past and present

iii

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction – What is synesthesia? ...... 1 Definition...... 1 The Synesthesia ListSM ...... 3 What causes synesthesia? ...... 4 What are the characteristics of synesthesia? ...... 6 On synesthesia being “abnormal” and ineffable ...... 11 Chapter 2: What is the full range of possibilities of types of synesthesia? ...... 13 How many different types of synesthesia are there? ...... 13 Can synesthesia be two-way? ...... 22 What is the ratio of synesthetes to non-synesthetes? ...... 22 What is the age of onset for congenital synesthesia? ...... 23 Chapter 3: From graphemes ...... 25 Grapheme  color ...... 25 Color  grapheme ...... 34 Grapheme personification...... 35 Grapheme  texture ...... 37 Examples ...... 37 Braille systems ...... 42 Causation ...... 43 Are there trends?...... 47 Are synesthetes prone to math problems? ...... 49 Illiteracy...... 55 Other types ...... 55 Chapter 4: From language and ideas ...... 57 Lexeme  color ...... 58 Lexeme  flavor, and phoneme  flavor ...... 58 Lexeme  odor ...... 60 Lexeme  touch ...... 61 iv

Number forms ...... 61 Time  color ...... 62 Time unit personification ...... 63 Number forms, time-lines, and math ...... 64 Ticker tape ...... 65 Other types ...... 67 Chapter 5: From music ...... 69 What types of music  X synesthesia are there?...... 72 Causation ...... 77 Music  flavor ...... 77 Music  odor...... 78 Other types ...... 79 Projection of music  visual synesthesia: an example ...... 79 Composers and Musicians mistaken for being synesthetes ...... 81 Chapter 6: From sounds ...... 85 Sound  color ...... 85 Sound  flavor ...... 87 Other types ...... 87 Chapter 7: From flavors and odors ...... 89 Flavor  color ...... 90 Flavor  sound ...... 93 Flavor  touch...... 93 Odor  color ...... 93 Other types ...... 94 Chapter 8: From touch, pain, and related senses ...... 95 Orgasm  colors ...... 95 Orgasm  flavor ...... 96 Pain  colors ...... 96 Touch  flavor ...... 96 Other types ...... 97 Chapter 9: From visual cues ...... 99 “Auras” ...... 99 Vision  flavor ...... 100

Vision  sound ...... 101 Mirror touch ...... 101 Other types ...... 102 Chapter 10: Things affecting synesthesia (attrition and enhancement) ...... 103 Can one lose congenital synesthesia? ...... 103 What drugs effect congenital synesthesia, and how?...... 105 Hormones and other factors affecting synesthesia ...... 111 Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and synesthesia ...... 111 Chapter 11: Some questions regarding synesthesia ...... 113 Are synesthetes more creative? ...... 113 Can I learn to have synesthesia? ...... 114 Does synesthesia improve memory? ...... 114 But aren’t people taught synesthetic paradigms as part of their culture? .... 114 Do cats or dogs have synesthesia? ...... 115 Synesthesia and problems with sleep ...... 116 Synesthetes, ghosts, and angels ...... 116 Is synesthesia a sign of evolutionary advancement?...... 117 Resources: ...... 121 On-line tests for synesthesia: ...... 121 Organizations: ...... 121 Websites providing forums and information: ...... 121 Facebook groups:...... 122 Bibliography ...... 123 Index ...... 139

Chapter 1: Introduction – What is synesthesia?

“I see a voice; now will I to the chink, To spy and I can hear my Thisby’s face” (Pyramus, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V.i., by William Shakespeare (1975 (1595))

Definition

Synesthesia is the general name for two sets (or “complexes”) of over 77 related cognitive traits. In the first set, “sensorial synesthesia“, stimuli to one sense, such as smell, are involuntarily simultaneously also perceived as if by one or more other, additional senses, such as sight and/or hearing. For example, the sounds of musical instruments might make one also see certain colors, each color specific and consistent with the timbre of the particular instrument playing. Or, the taste of espresso coffee could make one also see a pool of dark green oily fluid about four feet away. One highly documented case of synesthesia involved Michael O. Watson, “the man who tasted shapes”1, who synesthetically felt at or within his right hand shapes and textures corresponding to different flavors – the flavor of spearmint, for example, felt like cool smooth glass columns. With the second form of synesthesia, called “ordinal sequence” synesthesia (also known as “cognitive (category) synesthesia”), certain sets of things which individual cultures teach us to put together and categorize (and also usually serial- ize) in some specific way – such as letters, numbers, or people’s names – also get some kind of sensory addition, such as a smell, color or flavor. The most common forms of ordinal sequence synesthesia involve colored written letter characters (graphemes), numbers, time units, and musical notes or keys. For example, the synesthete might see, about a foot or two before her, different colors for different spoken vowel and consonant sounds, or perceive numbers and letters, whether conceptualized or before her in print, as colored. A friend of mine always perceives the letter “a” as pink, “b” as blue, and “c” as green, no matter what color of ink they are printed with. Actually, it might be a slight error to state that synesthesia is “simultaneous”. My fellow researcher Edward Hubbard points out that it takes “about 50 milli- seconds (50/1000 of a second) for our grapheme-color synesthetes to see their colors after seeing a letter or number”. However, Hubbard adds, “[w]ithout special equipment, it is nearly impossible to measure this amount of time. To you and me, 50 ms will feel like it is at the same time.”2 The word “synesthesia” comes directly from the Greek συν- (syn-) “union”, and αίσϑησις (aisthesis) “sensation”, thus meaning something akin to “a union of

1 See Cytowic 1993. 2 Personal communication from Edward Hubbard, 2002. 1 the senses”. “Synaesthesia” is the British English spelling of the word; in American English, it is often spelled “synesthesia”, without the first “a”. Both the American and British plural forms end with an “e”. The concept appears in other European languages, too: In Danish it is synæstesi. The Dutch word for “synaesthesia” is synesthesie. In Finnish, synestesia. In French, it is synesthésie, one type of which is audition colorée, “colored hearing”. In German, it is Synästhesie, and colored hearing is Farbenhören. In Greek, Συναισθησία; in Italian, sinestesie; in Portuguese, sinestezie; in Russian, Синестезия (sinestezia); in Swedish it is synestesi. In Japanese, it is 共感覚 (kyookankaku). And, in the type of Mandarin Chinese spoken in Taiwan, it is 連覺 (lián júe). Synesthesia is not a disease, nor is it a deficit, in most cases. I tend to refer to synesthesia as a “trait”, like left-handedness, or having red hair or green eyes. So, from a synesthete’s point of view, why would the study of synesthesia be important? Over the years that I have been investigating synesthesia, I have heard others frequently refer to what benefits the study of synesthesia might throw upon other, serious and life-threatening disorders. Synesthesia appears to have some aspects in common with – and thus helps us to understand – such conditions as phantom limbs. Correspondences I have received over the past twenty years also indicate that synesthesia may have some possible connections or associations with some forms of autism3, some types of epilepsies4, and migraines5. These are unquestionably worthwhile causes to pursue for further research. However, I feel that one major reason for studying synesthesia frequently and persistently seems to be over-looked: There are a lot of synesthetes out there in the world who live with synesthesia – and with being a synesthete – all of their lives. It is a real phenomenon to them, as much as hearing ringing in one’s ears is a real phenomenon for those who have tinnitus or as much as color vision is a real phenomenon for trichromats. The fact that a large number of individuals join sensations in a different way should not distract from its value as an area of scientific investigation. Synesthesiae are usually talked about in terms of the “inducer“, the sensory stimulus or cognitive concept which initiates the synesthetic perception, and the “concurrent“, the synesthetic perception itself. Thus, for example, if a synesthete smelled the scent of fresh mown grass, the inducer, he might have an added synesthetic perception of seeing or sensing the color dark purple “in his mind’s eye”, “concurrent” with perceiving the grass scent. When talking about types of synesthesiae, the standard current practice is to notate things in terms of the inducer first, leading to the concurrent; e.g., for the example just given, “odor  color”, or “odor to color”. So, for example, “sound  flavor” synesthesia would be such that hearing a sound makes one also, in addition, perceive a flavor; not vice versa that the flavor of a particular food item makes one synesthetically hear a sound.

3 Temple Grandin, for example, asserted this in personal communication to me. 4 See Cytowic 2002. 5 See, for example, Podoll & Robinson 2002. 2

The Synesthesia ListSM

In the winter of 1992-1993, I began the Synesthesia List6. My original intent with this wasn’t really anything noble. I had just begun working on my doctoral dissertation regarding synesthesia, and had tried to e-mail a few of the top-name researchers in the field to ask them questions. After a couple of back-and-forths with a handful of those that replied to me (such as Dr. Richard E. Cytowic), I became aware that there was very little correspondence going on between these various researchers; they knew of each other, and most probably knew each other personally, but there was not a regular more-or-less continuous discussion via correspondence going on. At that time, I belonged to a couple of other academic- based e-mail list-groups, such as the LINGUIST List7. I thought that a similar, albeit much smaller-scale, list-group would be useful for synesthesia researchers. I was just starting to write to various researchers asking them if they wished to subscribe to such a group when a major thought occurred to me: If these researchers are not corresponding much with each other, still, they are corresponding even less with synesthetes. And vice versa. How about, instead, constructing a list-group where the researchers can not only ask other researchers questions, but can also ask those people they research questions? And where the synesthetes can directly ask researchers or other synesthetes questions. More than twenty years later, the Synesthesia List still survives (including having gone for four years operating out of Taiwan), with over 1,000 members from more than 45 countries around the world. Six continents are represented. About ten years ago, for a period of about six or seven weeks, we even had a subscriber posting from a base in Antarctica. Also, about ten years ago, for a period of about two weeks, unbeknownst to other members, we had a temporary subscriber posting messages from the International Space Station, under a pseudonym. The major language for the Synesthesia List is English, but messages also appear in other languages, such as French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish. Over the course of more than twenty years, I have collected and saved many messages written to the group and privately to me from synesthetes and researchers alike. The synesthetes presented in this book will be mentioned in different ways. For many, I use the actual person’s name; unless stated otherwise, one may assume the name given is the person’s true name. Some people have opted to instead be given a pseudonym, or to remain anonymous; if I am using a pseudonym, I will state so when first mentioning the person. However, most wished to have their actual names used, proud to be identified as synesthetes and wishing to share information about their synesthesiae with others.

6 http://www.daysyn.com/Synesthesia-List.html 7 http://linguistlist.org/ 3

What causes synesthesia?

Let’s start with an analogy, using an example rather familiar to me: Let’s say that we have a neophyte linguist (I have a Ph.D. in Linguistics and have taught the subject for many years) who wants to do research towards explaining human language. In order to do so, he analyzes data from the following languages: Mandarin; English; Hindi; Spanish; Russian; Portuguese; and Indone- sian. More than 85% of the people of Earth speak one or more of these languages. Since that is such a large percentage, the linguist feels this is a quite significant majority, and thus is confident that it is a fair representation of human languages. Using these data, he then proceeds to construct and propose a unifying theory to explain “language”. Now, the thing is, our linguist looked at seven different languages. There are currently over 7,000 different languages on Earth. While our linguist looked at a set of languages spoken by more than 85% of all people of Earth, he looked at less than 0.1% of all human languages! Five of the seven languages examined (all except Mandarin and Indonesian) are from the same one language family (Indo-European); we thus have a total of three families represented. Yet there are easily over 220 different language families (that would thus be less than 1.5% of all language families that were surveyed). If we now turn to examine the past 200 years8 of research on synesthesia as a neurological trait, we find that, overwhelmingly, the actual experimental studies are on one or more of only seven types of synesthesia: graphemes to colors (by far the most prevalent); time units to colors; musical sounds to colors; general environmental sounds to colors; phonemes to colors; lexico-gustemic (lexemes to flavors) synesthesia; and mirror-touch synesthesia. Approximately 61% of all people who report having synesthesia have grapheme to color synesthesia. How- ever, there are readily over 80 different types of synesthesia. So, similar to our linguist, here we have well over 85% of all studies done on synesthesia focusing on only about 9% of all types of synesthesia. And many of those researchers then proceed to offer theories to explain “synesthesia”.

There are currently two main over-arching theories of synesthesia causation. Both incorporate the idea of there being dedicated areas of the brain which specialize in one or more certain specific functions. For example, the visual cortex can be further subdivided so as to note those areas that deal specifically with color processing (called the fourth visual areas, or V4 area), or those areas that deal with motion processing (V5). The “cross-activation” theory suggests that synesthesia emerges when activity in one region of the brain spills over into another, usually – but emphatically not always – adjacent, region of the brain. The areas do not have to be adjacent as long as there are anatomical connections9. The “disinhibited feed-back” theory

8 Since Sachs’ 1812 thesis; see Jewanski et al. 2009. 9 For more detail, see, for example, Ramachandran & Hubbard 2001b, and Hubbard, Brang & Ramachandran 2011. 4 proposes that synesthesia emerges from a reduction in the level of inhibition along neuronal feedback pathways10. Information travels not only “forward” from primary sensory areas to association areas, but also “back” from “higher/later” cortical regions to the “lower/earlier” sensory areas. The rate of feed-forward and feedback fluctuates within a fairly balanced rate most of the time for most people. However, if something disrupts the level of inhibition, then more signals from later stages could influence earlier stages of processing, which would then feed again to later stages, and could even go back-and-forth a couple of times in a loop. Note that the cross-activation theory and the disinhibition theory are not mutually exclusive. Both processes could occur towards creating different kinds of synesthesia in the same one individual. Further-more, both processes can occur simultaneously in a given individual; thus you could have synesthesiae where both types of information feed are playing off of one another. It has been proposed by some11 that all human infants start out as “synesthetes”, with any sensory input, whether through the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin, or otherwise, producing a mélange of perception which is simultaneously all and one vision-hearing-taste-touch-etc. The senses then differentiate, in part via gradual pruning of connections, beginning at about age 4-6 months, in a process which typically lasts well into the mid-teen years. However, in regards to terminology, this is not quite accurate. “Synesthesia” means a combining of “the senses”; an addition of perceptions from a secondary, “concurrent” mode to the perceptions of the primary, “inducer” mode. Thus, by definition, in order to have “synesthesia”, the senses have to be (deemed) already separated. It would be more correct to instead refer to neonates as “mon(a)esthetes“ (from the Greek μονο- (mono-) “one” and αίσϑησις (aisthesis) “sensation”), having only one sense. Congenital synesthesia thus results from a neotenic retention of aspects of neonatal monesthe- sia past the maturation point where, for most children, those sensory modes have now separated. On the genetic level, very little work so far has been done regarding specific factors related to synesthesia.12 However, research by Julian Asher and col- leagues13 suggests that the following chromosome regions might be involved in specifically ‘auditory  visual’ synesthesiae: 2q24; 5q33; 6p12; and 12p12. Also, Asher et al. note that the X chromosome apparently is not involved, contrary to previous speculation about female dominance in the rate of congenital synesthesia and the possibility of a lethal male gene. “The region on chromosome 6 […] has been strongly linked to dyslexia and specifically to difficulties in phono- logical decoding and orthographic processing, which is of particular interest given the importance of linguistic stimuli in synesthesia. Two genes in this region, KIAA0319 (MIM 609269) and DCDC2 (MIM 605755), have been proposed as candidate genes for dyslexia; both have been shown to play roles in neuronal migration, which has important implications for synesthesia given the evidence

10 See, for example, Grossenbacher & Lovelace 2001. 11 See, for example, Maurer 1997; also Holcombe et al. 2009; and James 1890, chapter 13, p. 488. 12 For a summation of this, see Bosley and Eagleman 2015. 13 Asher et al. 2009. 5 for altered neural architecture in the disorder. This region has also been linked to juvenile myoclonic epilepsy (MIM 606904), and a causative gene (EFHC1 [MIM 608815]) has been identified; this gene plays a role in apoptosis, with the mutations seen in epileptic families lowering its apoptotic effect. A mutation with similar effect in synesthetes could play a role in the retention of neonatal synesthetic pathways.”14 “The region on chromosome 5q identified in the NPL analysis includes DPYSL3 (MIM 601168), a gene involved in neural plasticity, axonal growth and guidance, and neuronal differentiation. In addition to being a good candidate given the known alternations in neural architecture in synesthetes, DPYSL3 is highly expressed in the late-fetal and early-postnatal brain and spinal cord but not in the adult brain, thereby making it an interesting candidate in the context of the evidence for a universal ‘neonatal synesthesia’ that disappears over the course of normal development.”15 Meanwhile, Brang and Ramachandran have focused on gene HTR2A, on chromosome 13q.16 This gene is involved in serotonin reception/inhibition (see Chapter 10). Brang and Ramachandran are looking specifically at activation of S2a receptors as producing synesthesia, and (hyper-)activation of S1 receptors as inhibiting S2a receptors and thus inhibiting synesthesia. Tomson and colleagues17 have data which suggests that an area of chromosome 16q is involved in grapheme  color synesthesia. Here again, no link to the X chromosome was found. This study also serves to point out further that synesthesia is a heterogeneous trait. Certain aspects of synesthesia causation might be on the chemical level. For example, I have good reasons, based upon unpublished experimental data, to conclude that it is specifically the ingestion of citric acid which makes me synesthetically see shades of sky blue for citric fruits; likewise, but more speculative, it might be lactic acid which makes me see the shades of blue I do for dairy products.

What are the characteristics of synesthesia?

Richard Cytowic originally posited eight diagnostic features of neurological synesthesia18; synesthesia is:

(1) involuntary and must be elicited; (2) projected, when visual, about a foot or two in front of a synesthete’s face; (3) durable; (4) discrete; (5) generic regarding its perceptions; (6) memorable;

14 Asher et al. 2009: 282-283. 15 Asher et al. 2009: 283. 16 Brang and Ramachandran 2008. 17 Tomson et al. 2011 18 See Cytowic 1989; see also Cytowic 2002: 67-70. 6

(7) emotional; and (8) noëtic.

Cytowic’s statement that visual synesthesia is projected (number 2 above) is incorrect, and has been the topic of frequent discussion amongst the synesthete community over the past twenty-some years. From these discussions, it has become quite apparent that the majority (somewhere around 80% -85%) of synesthetes who “see things” do so “inside the head”, as if the image is projected onto a screen or just “in the mind’s eye”. The “screen” is usually located “on the inside of the forehead” or “in the eyes”, although, for some synesthetes, it may be at the top of the head or even in back, at the base of the skull. Or, for those in this group, there is instead a “feeling of the color”; that is, for example, the sound of middle C on a piano “feels” red.19 These types of synesthetes have been labeled “associators”. For those who do see things “out there”, the images may range from a half meter or less away to fifty meters or more, although most are around the one-half to three meter range. Members of this latter group of synesthetes are currently commonly called “projectors”. It is possible for a multiple synesthete to be both a projector of one or more types and a non-projector (associator) of other types, or even for a synesthete to be both in regards to one type, varying between projecting and non-projecting with situations. Furthermore, although extremely rare, it is even possible for a synesthete to simultaneously both project and associate for the same inducer – with noticeably different concurrents, such as the letter ‘A’ being red “in the mind’s eye” but also projected as green onto the page. A study by Mike J. Dixon, Daniel Smilek, and Philip M. Merikle lends strong support to the claim that there are two distinct types of synesthetes who “see” things: projectors and associators.20 Among other things, Dixon, Smilek and Merikle found that projector synesthetes tend to show larger Stroop effects than associators do. Based upon Stroop test results, projected photisms are apparently more automatic than those for associators; this appears to be because projected photisms are more difficult to ignore than those “in the mind’s eye”. Projected photisms may be more difficult to ignore because they have specific spatial coordinates which are often near the spatial point of whatever it is inducing the synesthetic perception; the proximity of the two areas makes things tougher to overlook.

Regarding ‘projector’ synesthetes, Kirstie Sobue wrote the following to the Synesthesia List:

“[…] I am a definite ‘projector’. I see the colors of printed and written down [graphemes] as though they were on the paper – and can, for example, find words in a dictionary or names in a directory at high speed, because their

19 See Dixon et al. 2004. 20 Dixon et al. 2004. See also van Leeuwen et al. 2011, regarding projected vs. associated grapheme  color synesthesia; and Cohen et al. 2015, regarding neurological differences between associators and projectors. 7

colors jump out at me. I also […] ‘see’ colored subtitles for any conversation, radio or TV speech-based program, or even streams-of-consciousness type mental burbling inside my own head, as though they are running along a clear screen somewhere between me and the speaker […]. “However, I also have colors, patterns and shapes for ‘systems’ such as weekdays, calendars, time, etc., not all of which are compatible with the colors suggested by the graphemes involved. For example, M is yellow, A is red, and Y is dark green. ‘May,’ however, is definitely pink if I am thinking about the month … although […] it reverts to yellow, red and green if it’s a person’s name.”

A subscriber to The Synesthesia List wrote regarding her son,

“[W]hen he’s reading silently, he usually sees the colors inside his head, but very occasionally he sees them outside. If he’s reading out loud, the colors are both inside his head and projected a few inches in front of his eyes. If he’s talking or other people are talking, he sees the colors of what he assumes to be the spelling, both inside his head and outside his head. If he finds out the spelling is different, the colors change accordingly. Apparently, in the case of words, it’s related to the sound of the letters, not the shape of the letters. […] Since numbers do not represent sounds, I asked if his English words for numbers have the same color as his Arabic words for numbers. He said yes. Interestingly, [...] he sees the spelling of the Arabic number in an English spelling – but the letters do not take on their normal colors. They are the colors of the number concept only.”

Likewise, Dixon and colleagues21 have done studies on ambiguous graphemes (see Figure 1.1) which can look as either letters in words or numbers in mathematical figures (such as a line which could be either a ‘1’ (one) or the letter ‘I’, or a squared-off angular figure which could be either the letter ‘S’ or the number ‘5’). Dixon’s group found that the synesthetic color of the letter will indeed change for given synesthetes depending upon which grapheme – the letter or the number – the figure is perceived as. This raises the question of whether it is the form or the meaning of the grapheme which elicits synesthetic colors. Dixon et al.’s22 conclusion was that, for ‘projector’ synesthetes, it was meaning. However, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard argue that it is mainly the shape, and not the meaning, which determines the synesthetic response.23 A key element here24 may be whether the specific test subject we are looking at during a given test is a projector or associator synesthete. The question of whether it is meaning or shape which determines the color ties directly to the question of which part of the brain is cross-talking with the color-processing areas.

21 Dixon et al. 2006. 22 Dixon et al. 2006. 23 However, see Ramachandran & Hubbard 2001a, 2001b, 2003. 24 As Edward Hubbard has discussed with me in personal correspondences. 8

Figure 1.1 – An ambiguous grapheme

Returning to Cytowic‘s list of diagnostic features, “Durable” here means that the associations and relationships stay the same. For example, if the sound of a piano is sky-blue, it always has been and always will be that synesthetic color. This aspect has since come under debate, since it has become apparent that growth, hormonal changes, emotional trauma, aging, and degeneration, among other things, can all affect synesthetic perceptions. “Discrete” means that different items have different, distinct synesthetic associations. For example, the written letters ‘A’ and ‘R’ might both be synesthetically red, but they will be different shades of red, and will be readily and finely discriminated. Kimiko Koopman wrote to the Synesthesia List,

“Of course 4 is blue; that’s obvious. Saying that blue is 4 would also be correct, but only if you specified exactly what kind of blue you meant. “Blue could be 3 (light blue), 4 (medium dark blue), F (slightly darker than 3, but also grayish), M (medium blue, lighter than 4), T (faintly steel blue), W (navy blue), or Friday (about the same as F, but not grayish). “For red, it would be much clearer, since 5, G, S, and Sunday are almost the same bright red. For most colors, you would have to be talking about a specific shade/hue/ whatever in order to say it is a letter, digit or weekday. In general, I go from letters to color […] and not the other way around. I have, at times, described things like ‘an F-colored shirt’ though, or found myself wondering how R, 6, and Thursday are related.”

“Generic” primarily pertains to synesthetically perceived visual shapes. The shapes are basic geometrics, like circles, triangles, curves, spirals, clouds, or blobs, rather than complex structures such as, say, Winston Churchill’s face, the Notre Dame cathedral of Paris, or the Chicago skyline. “Memorable,” here, means that the synesthetic experience is very easy to remember; it does not mean 9 that synesthesia improves one’s general abilities to remember things, even things within the immediate realm of one’s synesthesia. “Emotional” means that a synesthetic experience is usually an emotional one, to some degree; I would also add to Cytowic’s claim by saying that “emotional” could mean that synesthetes are usually very emotionally wrapped up in their synesthesia(e). This defining feature has since been discarded, as it has been repeatedly pointed out by myself and other synesthetes that, for those with congenital synesthesia, after 25 years or more of experiencing a set of the same synesthetic perceptions virtually every day, those synesthetic experiences will probably be almost ignored on a daily basis, or at least considered quite mundane, by most such synesthetes. However, what if, instead, we replace “emotional” with “mean- ingful”? That is, synesthetic perceptions are given meanings by the synesthete. Over time, the meanings change, and some of the emotional content fades or alters, but the percepts always maintain a constructed meaning that the synesthete is consciously aware of and can relate. “Noëtic” pertains to a sort of “of course” feeling; that is, for example, a synesthete might feel that “of course” the sound of a saxophone is neon purple, “of course” the letter ‘A’ is red, or “of course” the month of December is pastel pink. This defining feature is currently being questioned, but, for the moment, appears to hold. Regarding these diagnostic criteria, one thing to keep in mind is that synesthetes do not get to choose their associations between things, and which things get associated with which has nothing to do with likes or dislikes, “good” or “bad” or any other emotional aspects. For example, I like the sound of French horns, but dislike the school bus yellow color they synesthetically evoke. I also like the sound of saxophones, and love the electric neon purple shapes they evoke. I dislike the flavor of certain colas, along with the synesthetic colors produced. That is, likes may go with dislikes, or vice versa, or likes may go with other likes, etc. And this is throughout the synesthete’s entire life. Someone could spend her whole life disgruntled, say, by the synesthetic colors produced when eating her favorite chocolates. Or, like me, tend to occasionally drink mixtures that make one ill (such as espresso with Tabasco sauce) just to see the colors. Now, granted, I can, if I want to, change my likes and dislikes regarding those things that initiate synesthesia, such as whether or not I like certain colas or certain flavored coffees. Likewise, I could probably change my preference for certain colors, growing to like the yellows produced by colas, or to dislike the greens and reds of jalapeno coffee. Thus, my attitude and likes and dislikes – my emotions and feelings – involved in my synesthesia could change. However, I can’t change the resulting synesthetic perceptions themselves (although, as mentioned previously, those perceptions might change for other reasons, such as hormonal changes due to illness or the adoption of drug abuse). In a Working Session of the 3rd Annual meeting of the American Synesthesia Association (ASA) (New York City, May 2nd – 4th, 2003), Cytowic’s criteria were thus modified to the following; synesthesia is:

(1) involuntary and must be elicited; (2) discrete;

(3) generic regarding its perceptions; (4) memorable; (5) uni-directional25; (6) noëtic.

In the course of the 5th annual meeting of the ASA (Houston, Texas, Oct. 28th – 30th, 2005), the criteria of uni-directionality was questioned, and it was determined that, in rare cases of synesthesia, bi-directionality can occur26. Returning to the aspect of “durable”, this is what is also frequently called “consistency“. With this being one of the criteria for synesthesia, one of the most common tests towards determining a diagnosis of synesthesia is thus a “consistency test”27, such as are found in the Synesthesia Battery set of tests (http://synesthete.org/).

On synesthesia being “abnormal” and ineffable

An analogy: If you have a pair of (six-sided) dice, 7 is the most likely (cumulative) number you will roll. There are six ways to roll a 7: 1 & 6; 2 & 5; 3 & 4; 4 & 3; 5 & 2; or 6 & 1. Your chances of rolling a 7 on a pair of dice are 1 out of 6, or about 16.7%. Likewise, rolling a cumulative 9 is less common, with only four ways to do it: 3 & 6; 4 & 5; 5 & 4; or 6 & 3. Your chances of rolling a 9 are 1 out of 9, or about 11%. There is only one way to roll a 12: 6 & 6. Rolling a 12 is much rarer than rolling a 7; your chance for a 12 is 1 out of 36, or about 2.8%. However, rolling a 12 on a pair of dice is wholly predictable. You can even calculate how likely it will be per 10,000 rolls. Now, on the other hand, if you were to roll a 13 on a pair of dice – Then, you might move to the assumption that something has changed to alter the dice. One or both dice are not “normal”. 13 on a pair of dice is an “abnormality”. From what we now know of genetics, neurology, biology, etc., we know that synesthesia is like rolling a 12 – not a 13 – on a pair of dice. There are BIG difference between “rare but normal and predictable” and “abnormal”.

In his famous essay, Thomas Nagel asked, “What is it like to be a bat?”28 Likewise, Baron Jakob von Uexküll investigated what it might be like to be a snail, a fly, a bee, or a sea urchin.29 Nagel’s point was that we, as humans, are so embedded in our own anthropocentric point of view that it is extremely difficult – but not impossible – for us to escape it to adequately conceptualize an alternate state of mind and perception; to know what it is like to be a bat, we are obliged to have to adopt the bat’s point of view, a major challenge. Yet, the ability for indi-

25 See von Melchner et al. 2000. 26 See e.g. Paffen et al. 2015. 27 See Baron-Cohen et al. 1987; Rich and Mattingley 2005. 28 Nagel 1974. 29 Von Uexküll 1957/1934. 11 vidual humans to do so is not necessarily a wholly 100% “can or can’t” proposition, but is more along the lines of a sliding continuum.30 Likewise, von Uexküll, a good forty years prior to Nagel, was proposing that, with careful and precise scientific study, using the latest technologies and methodologies and constantly up-dating our toolkits, we could indeed gain at least a basic understanding of what it is like to be a bat, while expanding our general knowledge of neuroscience. Nagel points out that “bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine.”31 In a similar manner, Nagel mentions how a sighted person might be able to imagine what being blind from birth is like, or the reverse for a blind person, but neither would be able to come close to knowing what it is like. Over the past decades, various researchers have asked whether a non-synesthete can possibly gain insight into what it is like to be a synesthete, and vice versa. If we take Nagel’s position, the answer is, basically, “Not likely; perhaps a little, but not much,” and perhaps we might as well stop right there. I prefer to go with von Uexküll.

30 See footnote of Nagel 1974: 442. 31 Nagel 1974: 438. 12

Chapter 2: What is the full range of possibilities of types of synesthesia?

How many different types of synesthesia are there?

Contrary to models taught in most grade schools around the world, which still generally teach ‘the five senses’ as per Aristotle, current Western science actually holds that there are perhaps around seventeen distinct senses32. These include but are not limited to such things as proprioception, different forms of pain (note the difference between pain produced by a pin-prick and pain from a stomach ache), perception of motion, balance (vestibular sense), and the gnosis system33. The question thus emerges: How many different types of synesthesia could exist? If we were to just take ‘the five senses’, that would give us 20 (5 x 4) possibilities; if we were to take the number of senses as seventeen, that would give us 272. And this is just the “sensorial” types of synesthesia; it doesn’t count the “ordinal sequence” types such as synesthetically colored graphemes. However, we also need to look at the question of the extent to which we have “different” senses; that is, the extent to which stimuli to one form of input (such as vibrations sensed by the ears) are only operated upon in the brain in one sensory mode. The blind mole rat, Spalax ehrenbergi, for example, processes auditory input in a region of the brain that is basically “the primary thalamic nucleus of sighted animals”34. So how many types are there? Why are some types far more common than others? Are there certain types that we are likely to never see? This set of questions is one that has haunted me for more than 30 years, and provides a major framework for this book. My intent in the following chapters is to pursue answers to these questions. In this book, I will address these questions from both my own experience and from what I have learned from communicating with well over 2,000 other synesthetes, over the course of more than 30 years, via the internet, telephone, handwritten letters, and face-to-face conversations. If we now consider my “Types of synesthesia” web page35, which, at time of writing, lists 80 different types of synesthesia, we can break down the inducers/correspondents into 19 components, which would thus result in 342 possible combinations for types of synesthesia (see Table 2.1). Thus, with 80 types, we see that 23.4% – between 1/5th and 1/4th – of all the theoretically possible types of synesthesia have been encountered so far.

32 See Howes 1991. 33 See Rivlin & Gravelle 1984; also Sacks 1985. 34 Bronchti et al. 2002: 311. 35 http://www.daysyn.com/Types-of-Syn.html 13

Table 2.1. Seventy-three types of synesthesia. The left hand column is inducers; the top row is concurrents. White indicates the type has been documented; red indicates no case of this type has yet been recorded; black signifies that this would not be a type of synesthesia. This is not to say that the other types – perhaps all 262 – might not also exist; but, if they do, they are apparently extremely rare.

Drug-induced synesthesia

It is currently generally assumed that the most immediately noticeable thing about drug-induced synesthesia is that you only see certain types, and never others: only the “pure” or “sensory” types of synesthesia, such as ‘sound  color’, and never the “cognitive, sequential” types such as ‘grapheme  color’. How- ever, this might not be quite accurate: melatonin has been seen to temporarily produce verifiable grapheme  color synesthesia in at least one subject36; yet, it should be pointed out that, while this subject did not normally experience grapheme  color synesthesia, he was a congenital synesthete who experienced the somewhat similar “number form” type of synesthesia. Thus the melatonin might have released a latent potential for this type of synesthesia, and it might still remain the case that such types of synesthesia are not produced by drugs for non- synesthetes.37

Ayahuasca

Ayahuasca, also known as yagé, is an infusion with chief components derived from the Banisteriopsis caapi vine and leaves from chacruna (e.g., Psy- chotria viridis) or chagropangai (e.g., Diplopterys cabrerana). Banisteriopsis caapi contains harmala alkaloids, including harmine, harmaline and tetra-hydro- harmine. Harmine and harmaline are selective and reversible inhibitors of mono- amine oxidase A (MAO-A), while tetrahydroharmine is a weak serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SRI). Ayahuasca tends to produce only visual synesthetic perceptions; it has been reported as producing ‘sound  vision’, ‘odor  vision’, and ‘touch  vision’.38

Hashish

Hashish is the resinous derivative of flowers of Cannabis sativa, the plant commonly known as marijuana in the United States. Its main active chemical is -3,4-trans-tetrahydrocannabinol (-THC), a hallucinogen39. Théophile Gautier described his synesthetic experiences with hashish as follows:

“My hearing is tremendously developed; I hear the sound of colors. The sounds of greens, reds, blues, yellows, come to me by waves perfectly distinct. An overturned glass, a creak of the armchair, a word pronounced

36 See Brang and Ramachandran 2008. 37 For an overview of drug-induced synesthesia, see Sinke et al. 2012, and Luke and Terhune 2013. 38 See Shanon 2002. 39 See Lewis & Elvin-Lewis 1977: 427-429. 16 very low, vibrating and resounding in me like the rumblings of thunder. Every object brushed yields a note of a harmonica or an Aeolian harp”40.

Also, “The colossal organ of Freiburg does not produce, undoubtedly, a mass of sonority larger than the piano touched by the indicator (one calls the sober follower thus). The notes vibrated with power as well, as they entered my chest like luminous arrows; soon the air played appeared to me to come out of myself; my fingers were agitated on an absent keyboard; the sounds spouted out some blues and reds, in electric sparks; the heart of Weber had been incarnated in me”41. Similarly, Charles Baudelaire wrote of how “the sounds take on colors, and the colors contain a music” [my translation]. And Ludlow42 writes, “Thus the hasheesh-eater knows what it is to be burned by salt fire, to smell colors, to see sounds, and, much more frequently, to see feelings” [emphasis in the original].

Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25)

Lewis and Elvin-Lewis write of Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25), “[i]ngesting or injecting only 100 g of LSD has a striking impact on the senses. Perception is greatly modified: colors become bright, even brilliant; sounds become louder and more important. Sense impressions overflow into one another (synaesthesia – thus the user hears music and watches sounds) and becomes confused and distorted, …”43. In Pollard, Uhr, and Stern’s experiment, LSD-25 produced few synesthetic effects, but did give the following: “Sort of, if you want uncomfortableness to have a color – you didn’t ask for one, I know, but I’ll give you one – it’s sort of an icky green. I have always hated that color of green. Here I am under it, writh- ing around, and I want to go to sleep and I’m hungry”44.

Mescaline

The hallucinogenic drug mescaline, a protoalkaloid compound, is naturally derived most often from the cactus Lophophora williamsii, commonly known as peyote, found native from Texas to central Mexico. In this form, it is usually taken by eating mescal buttons, the dried, brown pieces of the part of the cactus above ground. It may also be brewed into a tea. Mescaline may also be found in the cactus Tri-chocereus pachanoi, native to Peru.

40 My translation of Gautier 1846: 530, quoted in Marks 1997 (1975): 73; see also Gautier, in Baudelaire 1860/1961. 41 My translation of Gautier, in Baudelaire 1860/1961: 58. 42 1857: 149-150, quoted in Marks 1997 (1975): 74. 43 Lewis and Elvin-Lewis 1977: 415. 44 Pollard, Uhr and Stern 1965: 66. 17 According to Lewis and Elvin-Lewis45, shortly after ingestion, “peyote produces nausea, chills, and vomiting, often accompanied by terror, anxiety, and a dislocation of visual perspective, in the majority of users. After these unpleasant symptoms subside, mental stimulation begins. There is a clarity and intensity of thought, but most characteristic of all is the motion of indescribably brilliant colored visions, as well as exaggerated sensitivity to sounds and other sense impressions.” Peyote includes many alkaloids, including (but not limited to) mescaline, peyotline, anhaline, anhalamine, and lophophorine. It is the combination of these numerous alkaloids, and not just the influences of one or two alone, that causes peyote to have the effects it does. However, the specific effects of mescaline are to paralyze the central nervous system, produce an awareness of heaviness in the limbs, and cause colored visions. Reporting on their experiment subject, Orlando, Lewis and Elvin-Lewis pointed out his synesthetic experiences: “He was sitting on the floor of a room filled with music, and notes flowing from the stereo took on the form of long orange, red, and purple ribbons that permeated the room just as the music filled the air. Before long the ribbons drifted beyond the rooms as the walls disappeared, floating off in continuous streams from the machine to encompass the visible horizon. The whole world became a moving panorama of brightly colored, tex- tured ribbons, drifting aloft, filling the sky …”46. Regarding their experiments with mescaline, Simpson and McKellar47 report that the drug will produce synesthesia in those not normally synesthetic and will augment the vividness of experiences for those who are normally synesthetes. Mescaline may also produce types of synesthesia usually extremely rare, such as synesthetic taste attached to touch sensations.48 The experiment employed four subjects, two of which were not synesthetes, one who occasionally experienced colored hearing with music, and a full synesthete who frequently had synesthetic experiences. Colored hearing occurred with all four of the subjects. There were also instances of visions produced by movements, such as lifting a cup or feeling the lift of an elevator. Visual (colored and shaped) touch was also reported by two subjects (the partial and the full synesthete), and two subjects (the full synesthete and a non-synesthete) had colored olfactory experiences. The full synesthete also experienced tactile sight and tactile hearing: seeing a green door produced a feeling of chiffon and/or rubber at her fingers; the sounds of various notes on a piano felt either “plushy”, like “smooth cloth”, or like “a rather nasty plastic with no surface to it at all”49. The partial and the full synesthete both experienced visualized thermal sensations; a non-synesthete and the full synesthete had instances of visual imagery when experiencing pain.

45 Lewis and Elvin-Lewis 1977: 407. 46 Lewis & Elvin-Lewis 1977: 407. 47 Simpson and McKellar 1955. 48 See also Luke & Terhune 2013. 49 Simpson and McKellar 1955: 145-146. 18 PCP, or “angel dust”

PCP (phencyclidine hydrochloride) is more commonly known as “angel dust”. It was developed in the 1950s as an anesthetic for human use, and sold under the name Sernyl. Later tests indicated that it caused hallucinations, convul- sions, and violent behavior. For Pollard, Uhr, and Stern’s same subject as mentioned above (and also mentioned below regarding psilocybin), Sernyl produced the following: “I feel like I’m aqua but I know I have an orange dress on”50. This is not much by itself, but becomes more interesting when she followed soon with: “I’m going mad. Aqua mad”51.

Psilocybin

In 1965, Pollard, Uhr, and Stern set up an experiment in which the subjects were asked to talk freely and respond to questions and auditory stimuli while on various drugs. The subjects were blindfolded, wore earphones, were strapped loosely to a table, and had their hands wrapped in cotton to lessen the sense of touch; the room contained no other person (sound stimuli and questions coming from a recording played over the earphones), and the room was shut off from allowing new odors in. The subjects were not informed as to what drug they were on, what possible effects the drug might have, or even if they had been given a drug. The report of the experiments gives transcriptions of the subjects’ rambl- ings; synesthetic images and metaphors produced from these drugs were extremely few and far between, although there were some. Psilocybin is an alkaloid of the indole type which occurs naturally in species the fungus genus Psilocybe, one species of which is the Mexican sacred mush- room, the Teonan-actl. This alkaloid has hallucinogenic properties, including producing synesthesia (most commonly audio to visual).52 Symptoms produced from ingesting Psilocybe mushrooms include the following: “muscular relaxation, flaccidity, and pupil dilation in the early stages; then emotional disturbances, visual and auditory hallucinations; and eventually lassitude and mental and physical depression”53. In Pollard, Uhr, and Stern’s experiments, psilocybin produced the most synesthetic effects: “I sometimes feel I’ve told you these thrilling positions. But they’re all brown and yellow now. How can positions be brown and yellow?” (page 41). “Sounds and pictures. Sounds are sharp-pointed blades of grass; ...” (page 43). “Pink, it’s the same feeling” (page 45). “All around when I look with my fingers ... with my fingers? No with my eyes” (page 106).

50 Pollard, Uhr and Stern 1965: 99. 51 Pollard, Uhr, and Stern 1965: 103. 52 See Studerus et al. 2012. 53 Lewis and Elvin-Lewis 1977: 410. 19 Synesthesia resulting from injury (adventitious synesthesia)

It should be pointed out that synesthesia can also result from certain types of brain injury or seizures.54 There is, for example, a report55 of nine cases of visual synesthesia induced by auditory stimuli (that is, sound  visual) resulting from lesions of the anterior portion of the optic nerve and/or chiasm. The synesthetic visions always appeared within a defective portion of the visual field; the sound stimuli producing the synesthesia were always heard in the ear ipsilateral to (that is, on the same side as) the eye seeing the visions. There is also a report56 of visual synesthesia to auditory stimuli resulting ipsilateral to a tumor at the left medial temporal lobe and adjacent midbrain. The synesthesia disappeared with removal of the tumor mass. Sound  touch, sound  visual, and visual  flavor synesthesiae resulting from a stroke have also been seen as a result of a thalamic lesion.57 These types of adventitious synesthesia are apparently caused by “inap- propriate connections between nearby cortical territories” 58. One of the more recent subscribers to my synesthesia e-mail forum was a teenage girl who was involved in a car accident when she was fourteen. It is uncertain as to whether she suffered a concussion in the accident; there was nerve damage, she lost her sense of taste and smell, but apparently there was no noticeable brain injury. However, since that time, she has also experienced synesthetic smell perceptions induced by auditory stimuli; that is, she “smells” music. I should add that it is not unusual for someone who is without a particular sense, by normal understanding, to nevertheless experience synesthesia in that sense; there are other examples of anosmatic synesthetes who “smell” color, and blind synesthetes who “see” colors. These synesthetes, however, were not born with these conditions. Likewise, degeneration of an initial point of sensory perception (such as the eye, via retinitis pigmentosa) might result in certain types of synesthesia being acquired. To my knowledge, all of these cases of synesthesia induced through injury or degeneration are of the sensorial synesthesia form; there are no such cases resulting in, for example, colored letters, numbers, or days of the week. Fornazzari et al. (2012) talk about a case which they consider to include ‘grapheme-gustatory’ synesthesia59; however, it seems to me that, with this patient, the inducers were the colors of the graphemes, and not the various individual graphemes them-selves. There are also cases of synesthesia resulting as part of epileptic seizures. In these cases, the question of whether cognitive synesthesia comes into play is somewhat more complex. Alfred Ulrich60 writes of the case of Ernest, who began developing epilepsy at the age of three, after a bout of measles; since that time, Ernest had both petit mal and grand mal seizures. Ernest also developed a number

54 See, e.g., Brogaard et al. 2012. 55 Jacobs et al. 1981. 56 Vike et al. 1984. 57 Fornazzari et al. 2012. 58 Beauchamp and Ro 2008. 59 Fornazzari et al. 2012. 60 Ulrich 1903. 20 of forms of synesthesiae, including colored music, colored sounds in general (such as animal cries), colored smells and tastes, and synesthetically colored variances in temperature perception. Not all of Ernest’s synesthesiae were visual; he also, for example, experienced synesthetic taste and touch perceptions to sound stimuli. However, Ernest also experienced synesthetically colored phonemes (but, note, not graphemes). It should, however, be noted that Ernest’s brother, who did not have epilepsy, also has synesthesia; thus, Ernest’s synesthesia might actually be of the congenital, developmental type, altered by epilepsy. Epileptic seizures in the limbic system of the brain, specifically, in the hippocampus, may produce synesthesia in otherwise non-synesthetic people. This happens in about 4% of limbic seizures; however, the seizure must extend beyond the hippocampus to the cortex of the temporal lobe61. Comedian Rik Mayall experienced such synesthetic epi- sodes during epileptic seizures after reviving from his 1998 bike accident.62

Jenny Mabe wrote to the Synesthesia List,

“I indeed experienced both ‘normal’ and ‘epileptic’ synaesthesia …. [M]y seizures are almost 100% triggered by visual patterns, and almost all of those patterns are synaesthetic, as opposed to ‘actually’ seen. Another way of saying it, what I saw visually created a pattern synaesthetically, which then generated the epileptic response – which then generated ‘epileptic’ synaesthesia. “I don’t think this is a common triangulation of symptoms and syn- dromes, but perhaps it has something to offer scientifically in terms of show- ing that synaesthetic patterns seem to process with the same visual brain centers as ‘regular’ visual patterns, because either a synaesthetic or visual pattern can trigger a seizure in the same manner. Even though I don’t see synaesthetic patterns the same way I see the toaster in the kitchen, the same reactions happen when a trigger pattern appears in either realm.”

Synesthesia from an altered state of consciousness (ASC)

Very little is known regarding synesthesia attained via meditation or trance. However, Brang and Ramachandran63 note that meditation can influence serotonin S2a receptor activity, just as drugs such as LSD and melatonin do.64 Con- genital synesthesia can be experienced during trance; I have experienced ‘music to visual/spatial’ and ‘flavor to visual/spatial’ synesthesia – qualitatively different than my everyday congenital synesthesia – on at least three separate occasions while in trance. There are indications that people in general – that is, regardless of whether they are congenital synesthetes or not – have hypnagogic synesthetic experiences

61 See Cytowic 2002: 122-127. 62 Barber 2000. 63 Brang & Ramachandran 2008. 64 See also Brogaard 2013. 21 at least two or three times per year. Such experiences are usually ‘sound  visual‘; most commonly, a loud noise, such as a door slamming, produces a synesthetic visual flash. There are other possibilities for hypnagogic synesthetic experiences, though, such as a touch to the body making you think someone is calling your name. Research is currently underway on this topic65. Synesthesia can occur during dreams. I myself dream of hearing music, from time to time. In these dreams, the timbres of the instruments heard also produce my corresponding synesthetic perceptions of color and the appearance of having certain textural aspects as per my usual “waking” synesthesia. However, the ‘spatial projection’ aspect of my synesthesia is not the same during dreams; it is quite distorted, with most things immediately in front of me, and things do not move as per my “normal” synesthesia. I have also dreamed of eating certain foods, and had the corresponding synesthetic visual perceptions also appear for the flavors I dreamt I tasted. I have experienced ‘odor to visual/spatial’ synesthesia during dreams about seven times in my life where the dreamt odor was a smell which did not actually exist around me in my sleeping environment. Likewise, I have also had about five or six dreams where an actual surrounding environmental smell (e.g., a skunk, gasoline, my wife’s perfume) was incorporated into my dream. With every one of these times, the synesthetic perception was extremely vivid. There have been many accounts of synesthesia during dreams reported by others on the Synesthesia List over the past twenty years.

Can synesthesia be two-way?

Whereas ‘colored letters and numbers’ synesthesia has been long known, with hundreds of studies done on different letter and number sets, there emerged an idea that this type of synesthesia must, by default, be one-way66 – that is, seeing a letter or number might synesthetically evoke a color, but seeing a color wouldn’t evoke a letter or number. We now know that such is not the case: two-way synesthesia, while extremely rare, does exist67, and there are rare cases of synesthesia in which, indeed, seeing a specific color will synesthetically evoke a number or letter. For example, Philly Markowitz wrote to the Synesthesia List, “[I]f I see bright grass green, I get a sense of 3; a stop sign is 4.5; butterscotch yellow prompts 2.56.” I also have received mention of a separate case in which shapes, such as rectangles and pyramids, evoke synesthetic numbers. What is the ratio of synesthetes to non-synesthetes?

Estimates of the ratio of synesthetes to non-synesthetes have varied drastically, from Galton‘s 1883 statement that synesthesia is as frequent as 1 in 20 peo-

65 See, for example, Sagiv & Ben-Tal (forthcoming). 66 See, for example, Mills et al. 1999. 67 See, for example, Brugger et al. 2004; Cohen-Kadosh et al. 2005; Gebuis et al. 2009. 22 ple68, to Cytowic‘s claim that it is as rare as 1 per 25,000 individuals69. Although, currently, the most frequently mentioned number is probably that resulting from a study by Baron-Cohen and his colleagues70, which puts the ratio at about 1 per 2,000, more recent studies have the number as likely rather to be somewhere around 1 in 27 for finding any type of synesthesia in general across the popula- tion71. The percentage of the general human population which has synesthesia varies with the type involved; estimates run from 1 in 250 for basic types of cognitive synesthesia, such as colored graphemes or colored musical pitches, to 1 in 3,000 for more common forms of sensorial synesthesia such as colored musical sounds or colored taste sensations, to 1 in 25,000 or more (1 in a couple million(?)) for people with rare or multiple forms of synesthesia, such as synesthetes who synesthetically tastes things they touch. Synesthesia apparently has neurological aspects in regard to its causation, and it seems to be heritable, one component, possibly a “trigger factor”, perhaps passed down genetically as autosomal dominant. However, others72 have proposed X-linked dominant, with male lethality. “Male lethality” doesn’t mean that all males with the gene die (if it did, I wouldn’t be here as a male congenital synesthete). Rather, what it means is that this gene interplays with other genes to create a slightly increased chance for the male fetus to die. This could result in there being a slight ‘skewing’ to the basic ratio of female to male synesthetes. Yet, Simner and Carmichael’s 2015 study73 finds a ratio of male to female of about 1:1; there are reasons to suppose that earlier studies suffered from (sometimes major) underreporting by male subjects. There is also the recent case report of monozygotic twins, one of whom had synesthesia while the other did not.74 The idea that synesthesia might not be totally X-linked is further supported by evidence that it can skip generations75.

What is the age of onset for congenital synesthesia?

Congenital synesthesia typically starts manifesting itself at the age of 6 or 7 years.76 For multiple synesthetes, the second and any additional synesthesiae might not manifest until later, typically in early teen years but this could be as late as in the early 20s or even later for those with many types.

68 Galton 1883. 69 Cytowic 1989. 70 Baron-Cohen 1996. 71 Simner et al. 2006. 72 See Baron-Cohen & Harrison 1997; also Cytowic 2002: 51-59, which lends support to this proposition. 73 Simner and Carmichael 2015 ; see also Simner et al. 2006. 74 Smilek et al. 2002. 75 See Hubbard and Ramachandran 2003. 76 See Simner et al. 2009. 23

As to earliest documented age of onset, Riggs and Karwoski77 report on a boy aged 3 years and 11 months, who spoke of his music  visual synesthetic experiences. On the Synesthesia List, a mother reported that her son aged 3 years, 6 months experienced multiple types of synesthesia.

77 Riggs & Karwoski 1934: 33. 24

Chapter 3: From graphemes

Grapheme  color

Definitions

A ‘grapheme’ is a written mark that designates a phoneme, syllable, morph- eme, numerical concept, or other type of concept (such as, for example, hand or body movement) via an arbitrary or iconic connection established and maintained by a social group. A ‘phoneme’ is a bit more difficult to define. It is not a human speech sound in of itself; that is, it is not the sound produced. Rather, phonemes are language-specific categories, each phoneme being a grouping of close, similar sounds that are cognitively generalized to be considered all variants of the one same ‘speech sound’. For example, in English, there are many different ways that one could make the ‘p’ sound that starts the words ‘peat’ and ‘pot’ and ends the words ‘deep’ and ‘hop’. Physiologically and acoustically, each of these ‘p’ sounds is measurably significantly different. However, in English, it is “a difference which doesn’t make a difference”, and they are all considered the same one phoneme ‘p’. However, in English, there is a difference in meaning between ‘deem’ and ‘teem’; the difference between the ‘d’ and the ‘t’ (called a ‘minimal pair’) is “a difference which makes a difference” in English. Likewise, in another language, such as, for example, Khmer, it might make a difference in meaning whether you say [kat] (‘to cut’) as opposed to [khat] (‘to polish’) (the difference between the two spoken words is that the latter has a little puff of air after the initial sound and before the vowel, whereas the former is done without a puff). Or, contrariwise, in a language such as Saame, it might make no difference at all whether you say [laakykyu] or [laatytyu] (the raised ‘y’ indicates that the preceding sound is palatalized); they will both mean the same thing, ‘meadow’, since the [ky] sound and the [ty] sound are considered to be variants of the same one phoneme in that language. So, in the Roman alphabet, ‘K’ is a graphemic representation, which can be used to stand for the phoneme [k] in English. Likewise, in the English writing system, the grapheme ‘C’ is used to represent both the phoneme [k] and [s]; the graphemes ‘CH’ are used to represent the phonemes [tʃ] (the sound at the end of the word ‘fit’ followed immediately by the sound at the end of the word ‘fish’). In the Japanese katakana system, ‘ｶ’ is the grapheme used to represent the verbal syllable [ka]. In the Cyrillic alphabet, used to write Russian, ‘Ц’ represents the phoneme cluster [ts] (the cluster that we get in English as the end of ‘cats’). The Arabic numeral grapheme ‘3’ is used to represent the concept “three”. In Chinese, 猫 is the ideograph to represent the morphemic concept “cat”. Likewise,  and  are also graphemes, but do not represent phonemic, syllabic or morphemic elements of any currently written language. 25

Graphemic systems date back to at least 8000 B.C., in the Mesopotamian area. Logographic systems emerged around 3600 B.C.78 The development of using graphemes as phonetic symbols began around 3000 B.C. In China, writing emerged about 1200 B.C. In Mexico, a combined logographic and phonetic writing system began around 1000 B.C., most likely with the Olmecs.79 Thus, while the earliest medical documentation of graphemic synesthesia is the case of George T. L. Sachs, in 181280, grapheme-based synesthesiae most likely existed in certain areas of the world millennia beforehand. We know that synesthetes are not uniform in their correspondences between inducer and concurrent; for example, it is readily apparent that not all synesthetes see the letter ‘S’ as yellow. This however, has led some to the erroneous conclusion that synesthetes are wholly idiosyncratic, and that synesthetes’ surrounding cultures and environments will not and cannot play a role in shaping their synesthesiae. Although it is a very rare occurrence, it is possible that the entire set of a synesthete’s colored letters may have been shaped by the influence of patterned childhood objects, such as alphabet blocks or colored refrigerator magnets81. However, if such influence does occur, it is more likely to only shape the first four or five items in the series; that is, for example, ‘A, B, C, D, E’ or ‘1, 2, 3, 4’. In a case reported by Hancock82, for two monozygotic brothers, apparently both “associators”, the numbers 0 – 9 gained color association based upon colored jig- saw puzzle pieces. Most work on grapheme-related synesthesia involves phonetic systems such as variants of the Roman, Greek, or Cyrillic alphabets. When making claims about graphemes and synesthesia, we need to also consider such systems as Chin- ese and Egyptian ideograms and syllabary systems such as Japanese hiragana and Cherokee. But, furthermore, we need to also account for Braille systems, of which there are hundreds. Which leads us to another essential point: We need to differentiate between the assessment of a ‘visual to visual’ (or, more broadly, ‘visual to X’) synesthesia and the assessment of ‘grapheme to visual’ (or ‘grapheme to X’) synesthesia, as “grapheme” transcends the visual to also include (at least) tactile modes. This is said with the awareness that, for many if not most initially sighted people who go blind or learn Braille for other reasons, vision is a major if not primary aspect of reading Braille; and also with the realization that, for those who have never been sighted, ‘X to color’, or more broadly ‘X to vision’ synesthesia will most likely never occur. Nevertheless, for someone congenitally blind, we could encounter, say, ‘grapheme to flavor’ synesthesia developing as the person learns a Braille system. When making statements about ‘graphemic synesthesia’, some researchers have over-generalizing and only talked about a subset of visual graphemes. We also need to keep in mind that, while many people in the world are illiterate, there are important differences between being able to read and operate the

78 See Schmandt-Besserat 1992. 79 See Coe 2012; Sharer and Traxler 2006. 80 See Sachs 1812; Jewanski et al. 2009. 81 See Witthoft & Winawer 2006. 82 Hancock 2006. 26 graphemes of a language system and being able to interpret and understand a grapheme. For example, an arrow “” or a “smiley face” “” is a grapheme, but neither is part of a currently extant alphabet, syllabary, or such. So, we could encounter illiterate or pre-literate people who nevertheless have grapheme-related synesthesia. Likewise, if we make a claim regarding an individual’s grapheme- related synesthesia, are we accounting for all of the graphemes that person can interpret, or only those graphemes within, say, an alphabet? The human brain can and often does store and process vowels and consonants differently.83 In synesthesia, this is most often displayed with a focus on the vowels, which might have more prominent, brighter, colors, often primary colors, which will color the entire word or at least predominate over the colors of nearby consonants. Thus, for example, in the word “vowel”, the white color of the letter ‘o’ might make the entire word white; or the word might be colored a pale yellow, from the blending of only the color white from ‘o’ and yellow from ‘e’. It is possible for one grapheme to influence the color of an adjacent grapheme. For example, apparently, for Jenny Wight, the purple color of ‘4’ is so impressive and such a favorite that it will change the color of the preceding ‘2’ in the number ‘24’.

Additional aspects to consider

Non-Roman scripts

Regarding learning writing methods while learning a second language, Melanie Cauble wrote the following to the Synesthesia List:

“I took Japanese in high school […]. Yes, the symbols started out black at first (though I don’t really remember back that far) and, as I learned pronun- ciations, the symbols took on colors that coincide with the romaji. This was an especially interesting effect when characters can have different pronunci- ations depending on their context. I wouldn’t be surprised, however, if my synesthesia is what led me to learn languages so easily, leaving my poor new teacher to scramble to find enough work for me to do. “In terms of math symbols, yes, I always wanted to call capital sigma [Σ] Epsilon, since it was yellow and E-shaped and all.”

It is also possible for a synesthete to have colors connected to ideographic characters, such as are used in Chinese and Japanese (kanji).84 Hùi Min, a native of Singapore, wrote the following in a personal letter to me:

“When I see a particular Chinese character, I just see it as if it were all in colour, just like a letter of the Roman alphabet. […] I seem to be influenced

83 See Caramazza and Miceli 1990; Cubelli 1991; Cotelli et al. 2003. 84 See Simner et al. 2011; Hung 2013. 27

by a particular section of the character, not necessarily the ‘radical’. Neither is it constantly the top-most or left-most component. Sometimes, I don’t see a colour for certain char-acters at all. I’m not sure if complexity has anything to do with it, either. [….] “By the way, the character for ‘Min’ is ‘quickness’. I see it as a kind of grey, with a touch of pink. Very different from the English colour, which is bright red, but more purplish than pink. My first name is ‘Hui,’ which is a sort of marker pen orange in English. In Chinese, the character is ‘intelli- gence’ or ‘wisdom,’ and it’s fiery orange.”

Min Huì

敏慧

I attempted to elicit more information from Min regarding colored Chinese characters, and one of the items we hit upon was the classic test of the variations on the syllable “ma”, which has many different tonal variations, depending upon the language in question (many dialects of Mandarin have at least five tonal forms of “ma”). Min provided me with colors for three of the five basic “ma” variants, overlooking the “dead tone” variant used in Mandarin to denote a question. For Min, the character for the word “ma” with a high tone, meaning “mother”, is “strawberry pink”; the character for “ma” with a fall-rise tone, meaning “horse”, is “chocolate brown”; and for “ma” with a falling tone, meaning “to scold”, “charcoal grey”.

ma (high tone) = “mother” ma (fall-rise tone) = “horse” 媽馬

mà (falling tone) = “to scold” 罵

Kirstie Sobue, who learned Japanese as a second language after English, wrote to the list group:

“I learned Japanese from the age of 18. When I started, no Japanese symbols had colors of their own and, as a result, I found it almost impossible to read. After a period of a few months, though, they started to develop colors, and reading got a heck of a lot easier. “[T]he Japanese symbol 愛, which means ‘love’ but reads ‘ai’, is the colors of my ‘a’ and ‘i’ combined. There are a few exceptions: the symbol 西, which means ‘west’ and reads ‘nishi’, is a dark green to me – the color of my ‘w’ and consequently the dominant color of the word ‘west’ – rather than purple, the color of ‘n’ and therefore the dominant color in the phonetic 28 word ‘nishi’. Some words, it seems, have been colored more by their concept than by the phonetics. “I see 一, 二, 三 and the other Chinese characters for numbers in the same colors as I see the Arabic numbers 1, 2, 3 etc. This, to me, has always indicated that there is a link (in my head at least) between my grapheme colors and the ‘concept’ behind certain words. There are certain other words which have a strong ‘concept’ behind them that are also colored the same in English and Japanese, even though their Romanized spelling would be completely different and therefore, from a graphemic point of view, they ought to be different colors. These include ‘north’, ‘south’, ‘east’, ‘west’, the seasons, some months, ‘left’, and ‘right’. These words tend to retain their English ‘colors’ even when I see, hear or write them in Japanese.”

Anne Wight wrote the following:

“I am not a native Chinese speaker. However, I formally studied Mandarin Chinese at university for 4 years and am still fairly conversational in it. I can still recognize many of the characters, although not as many as when I was at university […]. “When I began studying Chinese, I was 18. At first, we did not learn the characters (Hanzi), but the pinyin pronunciation systems and words. Because I have grapheme synesthesia, all the pinyin had colours – the same as my usual grapheme colours. However, once the characters were intro- duced, they mostly took on the colours of their pinyin equivalents. For example, ‘Wo’ (‘I’) [我] was greenish because my ‘W’ is green. ‘Ni’ [‘you’; 你] was a brighter green because of my ‘N’ – slightly olive coloured. ‘Qing’ [‘please’, or ‘to ask’; 請] was light purplish because my ‘Q’ was light purplish then […]. “‘[S]hi’, the character for ‘to be’ [是], was always yellowish because I have a yellow ‘S’. Similarly, ‘men’ (‘door’) [門] was always pinkish because I have a pink ‘M’, etc. “The numbers were actually coloured not according to their Pinyin words but about half and half! I can’t explain why this happened; but, for example, ‘qi’ (7) [七] has always been yellow, not like my ‘Q’ but like my ‘7’. However, the character for ‘wu’ (5) [五] has always been green like my ‘W’ and not like my orange number ‘5’. ‘Ba’ (8) [八] was always reddish, although both my ‘B’ and my ‘8’ are red, so it is difficult to tell where the red came from precisely, as it could have been either of these associations which is responsible for this. My Chinese character for ‘3’ (‘san’) [三] is yellowish in Chinese, rather than red like the Arabic numeral, probably because of the ‘S’ in ‘san’ again. However, the character for the number ‘2’ (‘er’) [二] is cream in Chinese, probably because there it was associated with the number ‘2’, rather than with the red ‘e’ from the pinyin ‘er’. “You can sort of see what happened, anyway. Sadly, I have fewer colours for my Chinese words than in English or French, probably because so many words in Chinese are homophones and begin with the same letters! 29

In Chinese, it was mainly (but not entirely) the colour of the first letter which coloured the word, although there are a few exceptions, such as ‘shui’ (‘water’) [水], which was not yellow (like my ‘S’) but for which the character always appeared blue, probably because of the meaning of the word and the fact that it looks very much like running water. As in English, if the word had a very specific texture or association, that overtook it and shaped its colour. Another good example of this is ‘huo’ for ‘fire’ [火], which is not brown like the ‘h’ but sort of ash-grey.”

Punctuation marks and other symbols

There is a general tendency, in the synesthesia research literature, to speak of “graphemes” as “letters and numbers”. However, as stated above, a grapheme is any written symbol, such as an ideogram. Thus, this would also include punctuation marks, such as quotation marks, commas, and questions marks. For some ‘grapheme  X’ synesthetes, these graphemes can also take on synesthetic qualities. For example, an exclamation point (!) might be red, quotation marks (“) yellow, and a minus sign (-) in mathematics might be blue. For most ‘grapheme  color’ synesthetes, however, punctuation marks do not take on color, or are all black. Here, we could also consider graphemes such as a “smiley face” (  ), the dollar symbol ( $ ), or an arrow (  ), which may also take on synesthetic colors for some. For many ‘grapheme –> color synesthetes’, not only are letters colored, but so also are other type symbols. Jill Keeley wrote to the Synesthesia List,

“Periods are black; colons : are gray/silver, but a semicolon ; is rust, question marks ? are a shade of ruddy orangey brown, commas are a little lighter, / is a little gray, \ is a darker gray, + is similar to ?, = is gray/silver, $ is red like an S, but not as bright, @ is creamy like a. Arrows are orangey golden/tan. Asterisks * are metallic, but can be gold or silver depending on how large they are. “Most of my punctuation marks are just shades of neutrals. Because the colors are mostly neutral, I don’t think of punctuation as having color in the same way as other graphemes, but in (my) reality, they really do.”

Melanie Cauble wrote to the Synesthesia List the following:

“My punctuation has colors.

; is black and grey. @ is dark blue with a red background. = is dirty yellow. . is black. , is grey. ! is blue. ? is white. 30

$ is white on green. % is orange. ( ) are black on pink.

“Math symbols have colors, too, like the root sign [is red, and shapes have color as well. Triangle is orange, rectangle is green, octagon is blue, oval is purple, circle is red, pentagon is red, hexagon is yellowish green.”

For comparison, Anne Wight contributed her own set, following:

; – no color / black. @ – metallic royal bluish mixed with black but with a shiny sort of almost glittery texture or “finish” to it. = – yellow. . – black / no color. , – black / no color. ! – red. ? – light bluish and lavender with a sort of crackle texture or “finish” to it. “ – yellow. $ – yellowish and greenish blended together / chartreuse coloured. % – red and white; only the line is red, with whitish circles; it has always been two separate colours but not blended together – distinct for each part. ( – no color. + – red. - – bluish/greyish. x – purplish (not the letter, which is black, but the symbol for multiplication).  – black / no colour. # – olive green. & – magenta, and is, I think, about the same colour as the musical treble clef sign [ ], as they are a similar shape, or seemed so when I learned them. – (bass clef musical symbol) sort of mahogany.

Anne Wight wrote to the Synesthesia List regarding her son James,

“[M]y son refused to put question marks in his school work. He would do all other forms of punctuation, including quotations and commas etc. Finally, I asked him why and he was unsure. Then I asked what colour his question mark was. He said “red”. I pointed out that he had other red digits and marks and that that should not make any difference. He then said, “But it is an awful bricky red orange and I hate it!” I pointed out that whether he hated it or not, he had to use question marks in punctuation. All the same, it explains a lot about his school work and the way he thinks.” 31

And Kirstie Sobue wrote,

“My @ is red (like a) with the line around it in grey. My ampersand (&) is kind of yellow and orange, a similar color to the treble clef (in fact, if I see an ampersand or treble clef hand-written out of context, I often mistake them for one another). I have developed colors for Japanese characters over time, most of which are based on the sound of the word and the colors it would therefore be if written in English. Sometimes, my brain gets ‘deceived’ by the shape, though: the character 今, which means ‘now’ and reads ‘ima’, is red to me because my brain thinks it looks like a capital A, although written in Roman letters, the word is black and yellow. Strangely, I have a good friend whose surname is ‘Imamura’ (written 今村 in Japanese) and I can never remember her name without thinking quite hard, because I remember it as a red name, so (even though it’s a common and easily pronounced word) I can’t get my tongue around the pronunciation without kind of ‘overriding’ myself.”

Capital vs. lower-case

For some ‘grapheme  color’ synesthetes, upper-case versus lower-case can make a difference. Susan Peppera provided her following list:

“A is blue black but lighter with a red hue, a is blackish blue; “B is green, b is brown; “E is green, and e is red; “G is richer brown, and g is darker brown; “H is green, h is reddish with gray or type red rose with gray; “R is yellow ochre or amber, and r is the same but a little lighter; “Q is inky black, q is black but not as dark or rich; “N is brown, n is brown but darker.”

Font, or typeface

Ramachandran and Hubbard85 write, “[t]he font that evokes the most optim- ally saturated color is usually the simplest – for example, the clean lines of the typeface Helvetica rather than the ornate Gothic. But we have seen rare examples in which an unusual font was more effective at invoking strong color. We suggest that such fonts might serve as ultranormal stimuli that evoke even higher responses from the neurons involved with graphemes (the physical appearance of letters or numbers) than more prototypical fonts.”

85 Ramachandran & Hubbard 2003. 32

Typing

Then there is the story of a synesthete I know who replaced all of the keys on his laptop computer. Rather than displaying the graphemes, the new keys displayed only the colors which corresponded with each grapheme, creating a rainbow across the keyboard. After having done this, my friend reported that it was so much easier for him to recognize the various keys that his typing at least doubled in speed!

5eptember

In 2005, a quite unique thread of discussion hit the Synesthesia List. One of the subscribers offered the following for responses:

5eptember

Most of the grapheme-to-color synesthetes found this amusing but also noted that it was somewhat distracting with the odd effects the color change produced. A couple of members had almost – but not quite – the same color for ‘5’ and ‘S’ but did indeed note the subtle difference. Others had quite different colors for the two graphemes, such as one for whom ‘5’ and ‘F’ shared the same color, causing her to misread the word as ‘Feptember’. Most such synesthetes read the word as ‘September’, but noted that it had picked up an odd coloring, such as being initially orange when it ‘should be’ red. A couple of synesthetes reported that the color ‘flickered’ back and forth between that for ‘5’ and the color for ‘S’. One of the Synesthesia List members asked for the group’s reaction to seeing in print “5eptember”. Anne Wight replied, “[I]n my own case, I was […] taken aback by it somewhat. At first, the 5 looked orange, as usual, but, as I stepped back and it blurred to more of an ‘S’, it turned yellow, as is the case with my S, and my ‘September’ has always been yellow and brownish. It was a bit like that optical illusion of the two faces and the vase – I could move away from it and towards it and, as my myopia kicked in and the shapes blurred, the first letter could change from orange to yellow.” A variant of this, moving the ‘replaced’ grapheme to later in the word, quickly emerged, with the following:

Septem6er

Since, with ‘Septem6er’, the replaced grapheme was not the initial grapheme or vowel grapheme of the word, this produced less color ‘conflict’; many of the grapheme-to-color synesthetes didn’t even notice or remark upon this change until it was pointed out to them and they then focused upon it.

Zero

As an aside, I will note that graphemes representing the concept of “zero” date back to at least 1740 B.C. in Egypt, with the grapheme , nfr, which also meant “beautiful”.86 The concept of zero as a number, however, apparently has a later origin, in India, where it was being used regularly in calculations by 628 A.D. Meanwhile, in Mesoamerica, the Long Count calendar used many different graphemes, including the following, , to represent zero, or a place-holder, in the vigesimal (base-20) positional numeral system, the earliest dating apparently to 36 B.C. This would pre-date the Mayans, suggesting that the use of zero might have been an invention of the Olmecs.

Color  grapheme

Although extremely rare, ‘color  grapheme’ synesthesia does exist, too; and without the synesthete having ‘grapheme  color’. A member of the Synes- thesia List wrote the following:

“I don’t really interpret numbers as colors; I tend to go the opposite direction. 0 is not white, but white is zero. 9 is not black, but black is 9. 1 is not red, but red is 1. And pale lemon yellow is 0100. Bright magenta is 17 and deep magenta is 57. Pale purplish blue is 56. Intense bright orange is 3 and tri- angular. But intense bright green is also 3. I don’t like purples, however, because they are confusing as they cannot be numerically explained.”

While this synesthete did not have ‘number  color’, she did have ‘number  flavor’ synesthesia, as part of an apparently broader ‘lexeme  flavor’ synesthesia. A different list group member wrote:

“I am a mild grapheme-colour synaesthete with strongish number associations and weaker letter associations. I’ve been told I’m a bit anomalous because colours usually prompt me to ‘see’ numbers rather than the other way around. For example, if I see bright grass green, I get a sense of 3; a stop sign is 4.5; butterscotch yellow prompts 2.56. I get a few smells – the 2.56 yellow, for example, smells a bit like a candy apple.”

86 See Joseph 2011. 34

Grapheme personification

Ordinal Linguistic Personification (OLP)87 is a form of language-based synesthesia in which graphemes, days, and months are associated with aspects of gender and personalities; for example, the letter ‘V’ might be perceived to be a confident and indifferent girl, and the number ‘2’ a shy and wimpy boy (see Figure 3.1). Although now seen to be a very common type of language-based synesthesia, we currently still know very little about OLP. It was first reported in 189388, but was dismissed until recently by most researchers89. It is possible for a synesthete to have numbers which have personalities but no colors.

Jenna McClarty wrote the following to the group:

“It’s so weird to find other people that have gendered numbers, even number ‘personalities’ – like many other facets of synesthesia, it’s such a part of your inner world that it’s weird to hear other people have the same thing. [….] “0 = invisible, silent, like TV static; neuter. “1 = white, alabaster, ivory, down to earth; neuter. “2 = green, glowing, represents unity and fullness; androgynous – both male and female. “3 = blue, spirited, lively; male. “4 = reddish-purplish (sometimes pink) female, more subdued, but full of soul; a sister to 3, a cousin of 8. “5 = male, brown, mean and stupid; conspires with 7 and 9; not to be trusted. “6 = yellowish white, aloof, male. “7 = female, dark purple, passionate, scheming, not to be trusted. “8 = male, icy orange, aloof, stays out of everything intelligent, but uncaring; androgynous. “9 = dark brown; authoritative, like a teacher, but not to be trusted; male. “10 = reddish-pink, female, motherly; tries to make the younger, smaller, children numbers get along. “11 = like one, but female; alabaster, ivory, down to earth – mother 10’s helper. “12 = orange-tan, male, fatherly, husband to 10. “13 = indigo, spiritual older brother. “14 = female, passionate but nice, older sister.”

87 Simner and Holenstein, 2007. 88 See Calkins, 1893; Flournoy, 1893. 89 See Cytowic, 2002; also Day, 2005; Simner & Hubbard, 2006; Amin, et al., 2011; Sobczak-Edmans & Sagiv 2013. 35

Figure 3.1 – Ordinal Linguistic Personification

Jennifer Flora submitted the following to the Synesthesia List:

“[…] 4 and R are practically twins for me […]. They’re young and quite attractive (but don’t realize it) as well as a brilliant, knee-weakening blue – almost like light. Similar to pictures I’ve seen from under the sea, looking towards the sun. I’ve no other letters or numbers that compare to the allure of those two (color-wise). “Personality-wise, e might be my favorite – pre-pubescent to young teen, fun and full of energy (but there’s no one around to play with but c – and he can be obnoxious). “K and L are friends that can (and usually do) sit in comfortable silence with one another. L is male and K is sometimes male but usually androgynous. When K seems sort of female, I feel that she and L will likely marry one day. “9 and T are the most similar of any number and letter – both a saturated orange, strong and silent types, think they’re guarding the numbers/letters before them from others. “w is the most influential color-wise but unaware of his power (he’s a bit

dim). Until I delved into synesthesia, I disliked him so much that I changed the ‘w’ in my middle name to a ‘u.’ “I pity the pukey-pinkish Q and am somewhat revolted by him (sometimes ‘her’ or androgynous) – as are the rest of the letters (hence my pity). Q is a lumbering, shy soul trying not to bother anyone but does so despite his efforts to be invisible. He somewhat reminds me of myself in middle and high school (which is perhaps part of the revulsion).”

A different member of the Synesthesia List wrote,

“I have never changed my name, or even really had a specific name more preferable than my own in mind, but I have always struggled with feeling no connection to my first name, […]. Many […] have mentioned the colors of their names; but, after thinking about this for a while, I have found that my disconnection with my first name stems from my synaesthetic association of personalities with graphemes. “L” is a prim and proper, maternal woman, also a bit on the timid side, and likewise, each other letter in my first name possesses traits that I do not identify with too closely.

Grapheme  texture

Note that, for some synesthetes, not only do graphemes have an associated color, but they might also have an associated texture, which might only be perceived as per a visual aspect (that is, interpreted via shading, color contrasts, and borders, for example), or perceived via synesthetic touch perception. James Wight, for example, not only associates the color sky blue with the letter ‘E’, but ‘E’ also has a “sandy” texture. The letter ‘M’ is not only magenta or purple, but also has a texture of “wet dew”, or is “watery” or “like grass with lots of water on it”. The letter ‘P’ is pink, but also “feathery”.

Examples

The author and noted lepidopterist Vladimir V. Nabokov (see Picture 3.1) had grapheme  color synesthesia. He wrote of his

“fine case of colored hearing. Perhaps ‘hearing’ is not quite accurate, since the color sensation seems to be produced by the very act of my orally forming a given letter while I imagine its outline. The long a of the English alphabet (and it is this alphabet I have in mind farther on unless otherwise stated) has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g (vulcanized rubber) and r (a sooty rag bag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l, and the ivory-backed hand mirror of o take care of the whites. I am puzzled by my French on which I see as the brimming tension-surface of alcohol in a small glass. Passing on to the blue group, there is steely x, thundercloud z, and huckleberry k. Since 37

a subtle interaction exists between sound and shape, I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother- of-pearl. Adjacent tints do not merge, and diphthongs do not have special colors of their own, unless represented by a single character in some other language (thus the fluffy-gray, three-stemmed Russian letter that stands for sh [Ш], a letter as old as the rushes of the Nile, influences its English representation). “... In the green group, there are alder-leaf f, the unripe apple of p, and pistachio t. Dull green, combined somehow with violet, is the best I can do for w. The yellows comprise various e’s and i’s, creamy d, bright-golden y, and u, whose alphabetical value I can express only by ‘brassy with an olive sheen.’ In the brown group, there are the rich rubbery tone of soft g, paler j, and the drab shoelace of h. Finally, among the reds, b has the tone called burnt sienna by painters, m is a fold of pink flannel, and today I have at last perfectly matched v with ‘Rose Quartz’ in Maerz and Paul’s Dictionary of Color. The word for rainbow, a primary, but decidedly muddy, rainbow, is in my private language the hardly pronounceable: kzspygv.”90

It should be mentioned that Nabokov’s mother, Elena Ivanovna, was a synesthete, as was also his wife, Véra Evseyevna, and his son Dmitri. Nabokov intermeshed his synesthesia with his interest in lepidopterology in his novels, such as in Lolita. One of the most noticeable examples might be with the title character of Ada herself. From the above description of his colored letters, we see that, for Nabokov, ‘ADA’ would be yellow-black-yellow (see Figure 3.2). This would be the basic coloration of one of Nabokov’s favorite North American butter-flies, the yellow Monarch (see Picture 3.2). Nobel laureate (2006) author Orhan Pamuk (see Picture 3.3) also has grapheme  color synesthesia, as does Sir Robert Cailliau, one of the co- developers of the World Wide Web.91 The original logo for the World Wide Web, created by Cailliau (see Figure 3.3) is colored green because, for Cailliau, the letter ‘W’ is green.

90 Nabokov 1966: 34-35. 91 See Seaberg 2011. 38

Picture 3.1 – Vladimir Nabokov

Figure 3.2 Picture 3.2 – yellow Monarch butterfly

Picture 3.3 – Orhan Pamuk

Figure 3.3

Winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics, Richard Feynman (1918 – 1988; see Picture 3.4) had colored letters and numbers: “When I see equations, I see the letters in colors – I don’t know why. As I’m talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from Jahnke and Emde’s book, with light-tan j’s, slightly violet-bluish n’s, and dark brown x’s flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students.”92

92 Feynman 1988: 59. 40

Picture 3.4 – Richard Feynman

A subscriber to the Synesthesia List wrote the following: “Although usually not when writing, I [...] used to get numbers and letters mixed up in my head at times (which made algebra an absolute horror). This doesn’t happen much any- more but some ‘alternate’ spellings still look acceptable to me [...] – I still feel that [...] ‘48lph’ is a fine replacement for my brother Ralph’s name. Although I know, rationally, others could only assume what I’m trying to get across, [this version feels] natural and correct.”

Robin Schachat wrote to the group,

“In response to [another synesthete’s] comment about ‘spelling’ a word with ‘3’ rather than ‘e’: I’ve done a very similar thing with using ‘3’ aloud when trying to explain that something is ‘red’, and sometimes using ‘3’ in typed communication when I intended to use ‘r’. I don’t recall having substituted ‘3’ for ‘r’ when spelling aloud, and never when handwriting, but it is not at all infrequent when I use the computer. But the ‘e’, for me, is definitely darkish grass green, and I haven’t ever substituted a ‘6’ for an ‘e’. Of course, that may be because ‘6’ is a brighter tone, more of a Kelly green.”

Towards looking at the interaction of grapheme  color synesthesia with other types of synesthesia, Kirstie Sobue wrote:

“I often have to write numbers down in order to be able to ‘see’ them prop- erly. Although I have a good aural memory and can repeat a string of letters or numbers back to someone based on their sound, I don’t ‘see’ the numbers until I write them down, because the pronounced sounds often have their 41

own colors which are different to the colors of the numbers. This is always the case with phone numbers – even my own. If someone asks me for my phone number while I’m on the phone, I often instinctively write it down on anything that is in front of me and then read it back to them off the paper rather than actually just reeling off the numbers.”

Multiple synesthesiae can sometimes become quite complex. For some multiple synesthetes, ‘colored grapheme’ synesthesia can interact and interfere with other closely related types of synesthesia. Collins mentions her subject S, who apparently had colored graphemes, colored phonemes, and perhaps colored names and/or colored geometric shapes. For S, in regards to the consonant “B”, the “[l]ook of B is blue (because of liquid roundness of loops making the letter. Sound of B is white (due to vowel e, which is white). Idea of B is blue (is associated with name Betty and a childhood experience).”93

Braille systems

Ray McAllister, a ‘grapheme  color’ synesthete who began going blind at a young age and who is now significantly blind, wrote to the Synesthesia List, “Braille letters, for me, just take the color of their counterpart in English print.” Another synesthete, who wishes to remain anonymous, wrote to the group:

“Yes, I see colored Braille letters (they were once printed letters when I could see but have changed to Braille now), and they’re in a line one right after the other from zero to about one hundred or more. It usually stops mentally somewhere around one-hundred-ten. I don’t know why, though. The letters in Braille have not changed their colors much at all but there are times when ‘B’, a red-dish pink letter, isn’t as vivid. Partly, I think, it’s due to my not seeing colors for so long. I see light and darkness but color vision faded when I lost my sight, and my memory, which is very vivid I have to say, especially in dreams, is the only part of my mind that retains what everything looks like and their colors. “It does get frustrating when it comes to recalling an address of some sort, because the letters and numbers are so similar in shape but not color, so I sometimes jumble up the numbers and letters. Everything like that must be written down or I won’t remember anything but the colors, and that’s no good. “Funny, but, one day, I was thinking about how I saw my letters and I was shocked to realize that, for the past thirteen years since my vision loss, I see spoken words and letters in Braille. It sounds crazy but it’s true. Before, I’d seen all words people spoke and words I even said or heard in printed letters like alphabet letters. Then it changed to Braille. So, if you said the word ‘dog’, I’d see the Braille letters ‘D’, ‘O’, ‘G’, with their colors. ‘D’ is dark brown, ‘O’ is deep red, and ‘G’ is a faded orange.”

93 Collins 1929: 15. 42

Another Synesthesia List member wrote,

“Even when I read print numbers, I saw them in their own colors. Shortly after that, I went blind, as a child, and read Braille numbers, which vary greatly from printed numbers. Still, the colors were the same, although I must say the personalities of the numbers faded a slight bit with the Braille than with the print. I think this is due to the shape of the numbers in Braille. They’re not half as dimensional and are kind of dull after a while.”

One thing we need to keep in mind regarding Braille is whether the synesthesia is in response to the concepts of the graphemes, or in response to the tactile sensations.

Causation

Since grapheme  color synesthesia has been so heavily studied for decades, many different proposals have been offered towards its causation. One theory suggests that cross activation between grapheme areas and color areas in the fusiform gyrus94 play a major role. Another theory offers that this form of synesthesia results during processing of graphemic meaning in the anterior fusiform gyrus, when abnormal feedback travels back to posterior inferior temporal regions and the V4 color area95. This latter model has been extended by others to consider disinhibited feedback “from a multisensory nexus such as the superior temporal sulcus, posterior parietal lobe, intraparietal cortex or temporo-parietal- occipital junction”96. It is essential here to remind the reader that these two models of grapheme  color synesthesia are not mutually exclusive; both processes could be involved, and could even operate simultaneously. V.S. Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard have suggested97 that ‘colored number’ synesthesia for associator-type could result from abnormal cross-activation between the angular gyrus, which is where concepts of numbers are processed, and the superior temporal gyrus, which processes concepts of color. On the other hand, for projector-type synesthetes, colored numbers might result from hyper-connectivity between the fusiform gyrus, which processes forms, and the V4 areas of the fusiform which processes colors. There are indications98 that those with ‘grapheme  color’ synesthesia have a higher level of neuronal intra-network connectivity, and higher rates (about 3 times that of non-synesthetes) of both global and specific (medial and lateral visual networks to a right frontoparietal network) intrinsic network connectivity.

94 See, for example, Ramachandran and Hubbard 2001a; 200b; and Hubbard et al. 2005a. 95 Smilek et al. 2001. 96 Rouw and Scholte 2007: 792. See also Grossenbacher and Lovelace 2001; Esterman et al. 2006; Weiss et al. 2005. 97 Ramachandran & Hubbard 2001b. 98 Dovern et al. 2012. 43

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) study reveals regionally increased structural connectivity in inferior temporal, parietal, and frontal cortices of grapheme–color synesthetes.99 Research indicates “that in grapheme-color synesthetes, color area V4 showed a significant FC [functional connectivity] with other synesthesia- relevant regions, namely primary and secondary visual areas, auditory cortex bilateral, and right parietal cortex, while in control subjects, V4 was also functionally connected to primary and secondary visual areas but showed no FC with the auditory cortices and the right parietal cortex.”100 Using diffusion tensor imaging, Rouw and Scholte101 have produced data indicating that hyper-connectivity of white matter structures is involved for at least some grapheme  color synesthetes. Both ‘projector’ and ‘associator’ synesthetes showed greater connectivity in the left superior parietal or frontal cortex than the average for non-synesthetes. Furthermore, projector synesthetes (but not associators) showed a significantly strong amount of connectivity in the right inferior temporal cortex; thus, projectors could be differentiated from associators based upon the DTI readings. Note that this increase in white matter ties in with theories proposing a genetic predisposition to focused decreased pruning of con- nections102. “Of particular interest is the cluster of greater connectivity found in the inferior temporal cortex near the fusiform gyrus. The fusiform gyrus is involved in the perception and categorization of visual stimuli. Furthermore, an area specialized in the perception of the (form of) graphemes is located adjacent to an area specialized in the perception of colors. This has spurred the idea that grapheme-color synesthesia is caused by cross-connections between adjacently located grapheme and color areas in the fusiform gyrus.”103 Rouw and Scholte104 found that ‘grapheme  color’ projector synesthetes had an increased amount of gray matter (GM) in the visual cortex, compared to non-synesthetes. “This region of increased GM is located at the most anterior GM near intracalcarine sulcus in the left hemisphere (areas V17 and V18). Another region revealed […] is located in the right Heschl’s gyrus (primary auditory cortex), extending medial and superior into right insular cortex and right parietal operculum. […] A third region of increased GM in projectors compared with associator synesthetes is in the left precentral gyrus. This region is functionally described as the premotor and supplementary motor cortex. […] [T]wo clusters of increased GM were found bilaterally in prefrontal cortex. Projectors, compared with associators, show increased GM around right superior frontal sulcus (superior frontal gyrus, extending to middle frontal gyrus). Increased GM in the left hemisphere was located mostly in medial frontal gyrus. Both regions occupy a large anterior-posterior region of the superior part of the frontal lobe.”105 Contrariwise, ‘grapheme  color’ associator synesthetes have an increase

99 Rouw & Scholte 2007. 100 Dovern et al. 2012: 7617. 101 Rouw and Scholte 2007. 102 See, for example, Maurer 1997. 103 Rouw and Scholte 2007: 795. 104 Rouw and Scholte 2010. 105 Rouw and Scholte 2010: 6208 - 6209. 44 of gray matter in the hippocampal area, compared to projector synesthetes and non-synesthetes. “[One] region is located in the right hippocampus, possibly extending into the right thalamus. Increased GM was also found in the anterior part of the right hippocampus, extending into the right amygdala. [A] third region is located in the left hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, and temporal fusiform gyrus and extends into the posterior part of the thalamus. This region in the left hemisphere is located bilaterally from the two regions in the right hemisphere.”106 “Next to these regions in the hippocampus region [was] found increased gray matter in the right cerebellum, extending into the occipital lobe and bilaterally in the angular gyrus. The left region is located in angular gyrus, extending into superior temporal lobe. The right region is located in angular gyrus and the intraparietal sulcus, extending into superior parietal lobe.”107 Recent brain scan research108, however, indicates that the neural bases for grapheme  color synesthesia are apparently not localized to any specific visual processors, such as the V4 area in the occipital lobe; rather, grapheme  color is a global neurological process, involving hyper-connectivity and interactions throughout many areas of the brain, some relatively quite distant from each other. That is, grapheme-color synesthetes might not just have hyper-connectivity between the fusiform gyrus and the intraparietal sulcus but throughout the entire brain, such that synesthesia is only one of many byproducts of the hyper-connections. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to the right posterior parietal lobe has been seen to attenuate ‘grapheme  color’ synesthesia for a short period of time for some109.

Regarding whether childhood experiences have a causative influence upon the colors of letters, J. Hyde wrote to the group,

“In response to this and other questions about where letter/number synaesthesia might come from, I don’t think that it is from colored letters on the classroom wall (at least not in my case; maybe in other peoples’), mainly because I’ve never come across a school equipped with the wide range of colored paper needed to do my particular alphabet. Also, I have a lot of browns in my colour alphabet, some of them next to each other (m and n), and I doubt any self-respecting teacher would put up two brown letters next to each other like that, or even choose brown if interesting colours such as blue, red, green and yellow were available. Note: the only two blue-colored letters in my colour-bet are e and f, which are together, which makes me doubt the ‘letters on the classroom wall’ theory even more.”

Patricia Muniosguren wrote to the e-mail group,

106 Rouw and Scholte 2010: 6209. 107 Rouw and Scholte 2010: 6209. 108 Hupé et al. 2011; Hänggi et al. 2011. 109 Esterman et al. 2006. 45

“I was cleaning my closet recently and I found the book that taught me my alphabet. I looked through it to see if the colors on the page matched the colors in my synesthetic alphabet. I was expecting that it was going to match perfectly, so I was rather surprised to note that the colors were all wrong in the book. Only about 7 letters were the right color: g (light green), k (leaf green), r (red), s (deep golden yellow), t (deep green), w (basic green), and y (basic yellow). I [had] sort of figured out that my colored alphabet was caused by reading the book as a young child, so I am surprised to find out that it doesn’t match.”

Sandy Schimmel replied to Patricia Muniosguren’s letter by writing, “I had the very same experience! I thought that my number/musical note association was due to color dots on a toy piano keyboard. Imagine my surprise when I [finally once again] found it only to discover they were the ‘wrong’ colors.”

However, Angie Rodgers wrote to the group,

“In regards to how a synesthete develop[s] particular letter/colour associations, here is how I believe it worked for me. I have always had the kind of memory where, when I receive a new piece of information, I associate it with something I already know in an attempt to assist my memory. I dis- tinctly remember learning the alphabet 29 years ago in Kindergarten, and I do remember the reasons for several of the letter/colour associations I developed. When I first learned the letter A and was told that my first name started with A, I thought of it as hot pink, since that was my favorite colour at the time. With B, I pictured it as green, since my sister Bettina’s favorite colour was green. M was red because Mommy’s favorite colour was red. And so on. I don’t think all of my letters harbored such associations, but some have less interesting, murky colours while others have bright, vivid colours; I suspect the more vivid colours are a result of my early association with them. Assigning colours to my letters was a result of synesthesia rather than a deliberate memory game; however, the PARTICULAR colours with their letters, at least in some cases, was a choice rather than a random assig- nation.”

As to how colored letters emerge, we have the following curio, from Kirstie Sobue:

“My daughter has 2 interesting examples as well. Her P’s are, she says, red at the top (the round bit) and green further down (the stalk). I wonder if this is because of the strong association of the ‘p’ sound in the word ‘apple’. (But ‘apple’ is a red and green word to me, so I might be over-imagining the connection!!) Her Z’s are black and white stripes, which must surely have something to do with zebras. None of her other letters or numbers are more than one color, so these two must for some reason have strong image associations for her.”

Are there trends?

‘Grapheme  color’ synesthesia is one of the most common types of synesthesia. All forms of synesthesia are known for being quite idiosyncratic. No two people’s sets of synesthetic associations are the same. However, there are a few trends amongst synesthetes; discovering such trends has been the focus of one of my major lines of research over the past twenty years. Establishing criteria for color selection was somewhat difficult. In the end, from trial and error with various methods attempted during interviews and correspondences, as well as from the influence of my background in anthropology and ethnography, I settled upon Paul Kay’s110 designation of eleven basic irreducible color terms for English (black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, gray, orange, pink, and purple), and Crayola Crayons (those crayons having the exact same pre-mentioned names/designations) for “best example” or “focus” of each of these colors. Ready availability of the crayons, their ease in transport and use, and the fact that most subjects were very familiar with them, often proved extremely useful in facilitat- ing matters. Besides that, what crayons lack in “scientific rigor” they more than make up for in being fun – which is usually far more essential to most subjects, particularly young adolescents, and certainly helps in assuring future participation in additional interviews. My intention here wasn’t really too much for “extreme scientific rigor”, at this point, anyway; rather, it was just to get an initial overview of whether there might be any point in myself or others pursuing the matter further with more elaborate tools in more controlled experiments. Such experiments are now being conducted. Most of them use elaborate computerized color charts which digitalize aspects of color – such as setting Red, Blue, and Green (RBG) onto a scale of 0 to 255 – combined with consistency testing. With the computerized methodology, the consistency testing can now be set up all within one same test that takes the subject about thirty minutes or less to complete. Such tests are now being stan- dardized; one of the main efforts for this is through the Synesthesia Battery (http://www.synesthete.org/). In regards to my own preliminary research, for cases mentioned in the literature, most all listings of colors associated with letter graphemes given by the synesthetes used the eleven previously mentioned “base color term” color designations. For those cases I gathered myself, I asked the synesthete to try to classify things within the eleven categories, usually suggesting (and often using, in face- to-face interviews) Crayola crayons as a guide. When a different color designation was used, it was usually fairly easy to place it as a sub-type of one of the eleven given: for example, “tangerine” is a type of “orange”; “mint green” a type of “green”; “cherry” a type of red. I used my own judgment on this, but based my judgment very heavily on what category the synesthetes I worked with felt was most proper (for example, while many used the term “navy”, virtually all who did so then allowed that this was a type of “blue”). Some synesthetes mentioned more than one color for a particular letter; if two colors were mentioned, I scored each

110 See Kay and McDaniel 1978; Kay 1975; Kay and Regiel 2003; and Berlin and Kay 1969. 47 as 1/2 (0.5); if more than two colors were mentioned, I listed this as “extended” and excluded such from appropriate later calculations. With eleven colors, if things were evenly distributed, that means that any particular letter (‘A’, for example) would have one of these colors (“red”, for example) about 9.1% of the time. In my study, of 172 “colored letter” synesthetes, 43% perceive the letter ‘A’ as red; of 123 synesthetes, 57% perceive the letter ‘O’ as white. The letter ‘I’ holds interest: of 119, 38% perceive this letter as white, 28% as black, and 12% as gray; that is, 78% perceive is as non-hued; likewise, 75% perceive the letter ‘O’ as non-hued. Of 93 synesthetes, 44% perceive ‘Y’ as yellow. Actually, working with the assumption of even distribution across all eleven colors, only one letter, ‘Q’, falls within parameters, and this might just be serendipitous. One could raise the argument, as per Kay’s111 studies, that certain color names, such as ‘black’, ‘white’, ‘red’, and ‘green’ are more common than others such as ‘orange’, ‘pink’ or ‘purple.’ However, this would imply that, as samplings increase, all letter colors would progress towards ‘black’, ‘white’, ‘red’ or ‘green’ being the mode. Such does not occur. In addition, the synesthete is attempting to describe specifically what color is “seen” or associated with each letter, not just rapidly picking out a random convenient color name. Figure 3.4 presents my findings for the most common synesthetic colors for each alphabet letter and numerical digit, based upon my research sample of synesthetes; thus, a “typical” synesthete’s set. You might notice that the letters, as a whole, are not very colorful, and feature a fair amount of grays, browns, and dull tones, while the digits are far more colorful and brilliant; also, some colors may repeat. This is typical for the majority of colored grapheme synesthetes. We might instead investigate this phenomenon by asking whether certain synesthetic colors are more likely to be connected with certain geometric shapes; for example, white with circles, such as with ‘O’ and ‘Q’; red with triangles, such as with ‘A’, black with crosses, such as with ‘X.’

Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Figure 3.4 – A representation of a typical colored-grapheme synesthete’s letter and digit sets

111 Kay 1975. 48

Are synesthetes prone to math problems?

Ian (a pseudonym) was a 12-year-old synesthete I once assisted. Ian has colored-grapheme synesthesia, and was having trouble with algebra in school. Both he and his parents, as well as some of his teachers and administrators at his school, were worried that this form of synesthesia might, in of itself, somehow create an insurmountable drawback for Ian in a number of academic areas. It gave them comfort to hear that not only did people use colored letters and numbers to advantage, but that Richard Feynman used his to memorize formulae that gained him a Nobel Prize (the fact that synesthete Vladimir Nabokov was the author of Lolita and Ada gave some of the teachers a little less comfort, but this was perhaps countered by the amazingly strong piousness of Olivier Messiaen and Amy Beach, both also synesthetes). Ian’s problems in mathematics are similar to that of a couple of other young synesthetes whom I also assisted. To give a basic example of these types of problems, not taken from any one case, but rather put together from many, let us say that, for a given synesthete, whom I will name ‘Bob’, 1 is black, 2 is sky blue, 3 is red, 4 is dark blue, 5 is light green, 6 is yellow, 7 is orange, 8 is dark green, 9 is purple, and 0 (zero) is white. Thus, we have the following:

3 + 4 = 7 3 + 4 = 9 3 x 4 = 12

Now, this means that, in math class, red plus blue equals orange(!), while in science and art classes – and most everywhere else – red plus blue equals purple. Likewise, in math, if you take red away from orange, you get blue, whereas, in art class, you get yellow. How does one reconcile these differences? Consider that, in science class, you learn that, if you combine all colors, you get white – however, white is zero, which is nothing! On the other hand, in art class, if you melt all of your crayons from your box together, you get black – and, for Bob, black is one (1). And it only becomes more complex when one begins algebra, because the letter ‘X’, for our synesthete, is also black, and ‘Y’ is yellow. Now, how can X and Y be “variables” if ‘X = black = 1’ and ‘Y = yellow = 6’? It works just fine if we say

X + 4 = 5 or 9 - Y = 3 ; however, it can become more confusing in an equation like

4 x Y = 20 , as this could mistakenly become

4 x 6 = 20 .

Note that the yellow ‘Y’ has been replaced by the same-colored yellow ‘6’. However, also note that white zero of ‘20’ has not totally disappeared on the white page; nevertheless, because the zero is perceived to be white (or “clear”; or clear when on a white surface), the zero might frequently be ignored or overlooked. Taking complications a step further, it is not infrequent that such colored- grapheme synesthetes will also perceive numbers (and, less often, letters) as having gender and personality, such as ‘2’ being a shy, wimpy boy and ‘9’ being a vain, elitist girl. Thus, extending our example, Bob might really dislike certain things, such as ‘7 x 7’, or office number 294, that result in putting ‘4’ (a plain but decent hard-working older woman) and ‘9’ together, as they greatly dislike each other and do not get along at all. Figure 3.1, above, represents such a set of letters and numbers undergoing Ordinal Linguistic Personification (OLP), with their gender and personality descriptions.

Carrie Tiffany wrote to the Synesthesia List,

“I have an intense association between colours and numbers. I migrated to Australia from the UK in the 1970s with my parents and remember having to do a maths test at primary school to determine what grade I should be put in. I think I was around 5 or 6 years old. I drew blocks of colour for my answers. Some of them just one colour – others two colours merging together. I remember the sum three plus five. Three is yellow for me and five is blue so I drew a merging of blue and yellow (a nice kind of green) as my answer. The teacher was appalled and held the sheet up in front of the class saying something like, ‘This might be how they do maths in England but it certainly isn’t how we do it here.’ Much laughter and humiliation. At this point, I realised other people didn’t see it this way and I tried to filter it out, which worked – to a degree.”

Elizabeth Naftaniel mentioned to the Synesthesia List that, along with her colored integer numbers, she also has colors for fractions:

1/2 banana 1/3 melon 1/4 light turquoise 1/5 white on red 1/6 peach 1/7 white on forest green 1/8 white on hot pink 1/9 blueberry 1/10 black and white pi rainbow

The colors of these numbers are related to, but differ from, Naftaniel’s colors for integral numbers.

Robin Schachat wrote to the group,

“To whoever it was who asked about pi, negative numbers and imaginary numbers: Pi has always been a very solid, dependable, easy number. It is the French flag flapping backwards, all one unit, red/white/blue, in equal rectangles, but all completely in one. Makes sense, since red = 3, white = 1, blue = 4. The 159, etc., don’t really count. “Imaginary numbers have no color. They are wavery ghosts without outlines, sort of as if the form of the digit were a transparent piece of antique window glass, all wavery and runny and distinguishable only by the distor- tion it creates. Despite having managed nicely in high school math, I have never truly been able to grasp imaginary numbers. “Negative numbers are dark, dark charcoal grey, with just a hint of their positive colors overlaid, and they run consecutively straight downward in a column, although positive numbers do not necessarily run up in a column. But it has always delighted me that, by joining together (multiplication), the poor, dark numbers can erupt into a clear color again!”

However, a different synesthete wrote,

“I was the exact opposite! I couldn’t cope with manipulating ‘normal’ numbers because the colours interfered too much, so I ended up learning basic math parrot fashion/by rote. I stupidly tried my hand at A Level maths, and found that differentiation and integration were my complete downfall, while imaginary numbers were fabulous BECAUSE they didn’t have a strong colour. I’ve never really questioned it until now, but even my math teacher thought it was odd that I could cope with one but not the other. Imaginary numbers were my saving grace because it proved to everyone else in my class that I wasn’t totally useless at maths.”

However, I do not wish to convey that these types of synesthesia always present a problem for the synesthete, nor that they cannot be overcome – often in amusing and enjoyable manners. Take the following example from one of my Synesthesia List members:

“Today, I wanted to remember ‘43.75’, and couldn’t write it down, so it was destined to be lost. Then I tried this new technique and it worked! “4 is almost the same color as R. “3 and S are the only yellows. “I just picked a similar green in my alphabet for 7 – V. “And 5 is close to E’s orange. “So I came up with ‘R S V E’. But, since P is also orange (though a touch darker than 5), I just changed the E to P and got ‘RSVP’. I’m not sure how well it will work with a less memorable string of letters, of course, but it’s fun to play with, at least.”

Yet another wrote,

“I do have ‘the math problem’ – if I try to do sums in my head, the numbers jump around and I have trouble keeping track of them (I can’t explain it very well, but I imagine it’s something like the way letters ‘jump around’ for people with dyslexia). I have to write down every single step of even the simplest sum, just in case the numbers leap out of view and leave me stranded. “However, I’m fine with logical problems, quite enjoyed algebra at school, etc. I’m not really sure how much of a role the colors of the numbers play in my problems with mental arithmetic. “I have been thinking about [the] idea that the color of a number might ‘mean’ more to me than the fact that it is x amount of units, and I still don’t know if this applies to me or not. I’m afraid I think it might! The first thing that I associate with ‘2’ is not the fact that it is two units, but the fact that it is a greenish yellow. This is because, at some point in my life, I have had to learn that 2 = two units, but the fact that it is that color has always (to my knowledge) been innate.”

Cameron La Follette adds,

“I, too, have synesthesia-related math abilities. All my numbers have color, gender and personality. I made the rather serious mistake of trying to tell my fourth-grade teacher why I found it hard to do math the regular way, because numbers’ colors and personalities had to fit, and the ones that didn’t were hard to remember. He was quite freaked out about it, and sort of perse- cuted me the rest of the year, trying to find problems I couldn’t do. But I could do them – just not the ‘normal’ way. Every equation was a new social situation with numbers, and a new story of interaction and color. “Plus, I had an inner screen on which I saw problems being worked out. I didn’t ‘do’ anything; I just watched, and the figures moved and self-solved. But it was very intimate to me. I was involved in it, as if all the numbers were aspects of me interacting and cavorting in fun. I loved math! “But years of being poorly taught took its toll on all this. The screen is kind of dimmed now, though that is only because I am kind of holding it back. It hasn’t really dimmed in any permanent way. I have to count on my fingers, which really annoys me, because it isn’t the actual way I do math. To me, math is color and relationship of numbers on a starry space deep in my mind, and I miss it very much. But it will return.”

Carrie Tiffany also once wrote to me of two other childhood experiences:

“At around nine years of age, my teacher gave each a student a date on which they had to recite three sets of times tables in front of the class. We could pick any three tables between 5 - 10. I knew I was going to find this very difficult and I was terrified of the humiliation that would follow. I struggled for weeks trying to learn them. I wrote them out endlessly on scraps of paper and looked at them for hours. I chanted them, clapped them, sung them, but they just wouldn’t stick. I wasn’t too bad while the numbers where in single digit as I simply ‘saw’ their colour; but, when they were double digits, one

52 of the two colours would dominate, making it almost impossible to ‘see’ the other colour. One night, I put the three lists inside my pillow case in the hope they would somehow seep in to my brain during sleep! The dreaded date arrived. I started with 5s. Five is a very strong blue for me; in publish- ing, it is called either process or reflex blue. I think of it as ‘big blue’, as there is something expansive about it – like an immense Australian summer sky. I primed myself, I got my mouth ready to start, to say ‘five’, but ‘big blue’ came out instead. The kids laughed, the teacher shook her head hope- lessly. I can’t remember what happened next – I think I probably said I was sick, which was my main strategy for getting out of maths. “Another teacher I had ran a seating hierarchy – a very old-fashioned idea. The class was ranked on achievement and the students sat from front to back in descending order of achievement. (A stupid system, as the students that needed the most attention were furthest away. It also created a lot of social problems in the play-ground.) This teacher was extremely inflexible. She spent a great deal of time making sure everyone was sitting at the right desk based on their performance in various tests. But then there was me. I was a good student in all of the humanities subjects, English, His- tory, Geography, Art. I did pretty well in Science, too; but I was the bottom student in Maths. Rather than just sit me somewhere in the middle she insisted that I move seats every time we did maths. I moved from the very front of the class to the very back of the class. As there was an exact number of seats for students, the whole class got to move up one seat to make way for me. The teacher called this ‘me taking my medicine’, as she saw my failure in maths as an obstinate laziness.”

Lisa Buckley wrote,

“I can remember getting in a tizzy in maths lessons in primary school, even when being taught basic maths such as times tables. I was also ridiculed at school because I couldn’t work out basic multiplication – which was complicated even further when we learned applied maths (how much do 5 apples cost if each apple is 15p type of thing). If you started adding colored fruit into the equation, that REALLY screwed things up. I can always remember getting four apples and three oranges confused (orange times green versus green times orange – unless, of course, it was specified that the apples were in fact red delicious!). “On the other hand, I learned to spell very quickly, as I could remember exactly what colour each word was – and, as a result, I got 100% in spelling tests throughout my primary education […]. As a PhD student […], I’ve found that I’ve developed a reputation amongst the research and academic staff as being a good proof-reader – the errors jump out and hit me.”

Anne Wight wrote, regarding her daughter Jenny,

“Jenny’s form tutor mentioned yesterday at parent/teacher night specifically as regards Jenny’s music/sound syn that she had forgotten about Jenny’s

condition one day in class and put on a musical times tables cassette for the class to listen to whilst they were either doing their tables or colouring them in. She said she looked at Jenny after it had been going a minute or two and saw that Jenny had stopped work and ‘glazed over’ a bit. She said that she then remembered that Jenny had music/ sound syn and that she then said to Jenny that she would turn off the music in a moment and that, sorry, she had forgotten that Jenny found music really difficult to work with and Jenny could have extra time to finish. She then noted that, when the music stopped, Jenny was able to go back and finish the work very quickly. “As a mum, I feel much better knowing that the teacher knows all about this and is able to help Jenny focus much better this year. Jenny ranked first in her class on the exams taken as a whole, largely due to this teacher and her good sense!”

Lisa Buckley added, in a separate message, the following:

“I’ve suffered from nervous conditions from being a child – and have strong memories of it being a result of my colour-language syn. I had great difficulty with maths as a child of 4-5, as I couldn’t understand why it came so easily to other children in my class, but I was struggling because of the coloured nature of the numbers. Most maths lessons ended up with me in tears – as a result of which I got nicknamed ‘waterworks’, because I just couldn’t get my head around simple questions like 2 + 4 = ? Everyone else knew it was 6, while I couldn’t get past it being red. “At the time, I don’t think I ever pushed the issue of it being a colour and not a number; but I knew it was somehow wrong and that no one else saw it as a problem (I found out at the age of 19 that it was likely because they weren’t synaesthetes!). But it made me desperately unhappy. My school reports all the way through primary school (to age 11) spoke of me being very teary and nervy – and I still associate school buildings with the feeling of dread. Only yesterday, I drove past the local secondary school (from 11 to 18) and thought I hope I never have children, because I can’t face having to take them into school – how stupid did that make me feel! “I’m now 30, and managed to get by in maths sufficiently to have studied for three science degrees (BSc, MSc, PhD) at three different universities; and, as a technical scientist, I now have to use maths on a regular basis for client presentations. Much of it is learnt parrot fashion, so I don’t feel so bad about presenting the data. But those feelings of helplessness and inability to master simple maths have stayed with me in more general circum- stances – I’ve had two nervous break-downs (at 16 and 24), and am currently off work with stress. I take things very much to heart, and once the waterworks start they’re hard to stop! I don’t know whether I have a natural pre- dispostion to stress-related illness, but I still feel that much of it stems back to the ridicule I received at school for not grasping maths at an early age due to my colour-language syn, and not having anyone to tell me that there was nothing wrong with my perception, that I was just different.”

Illiteracy

There is the question of what happens regarding people who do not learn letters and numbers. Could some of them thus be latent synesthetes whose synesthesia never has a chance to be manifested? One could ask, “If the person never learns letters and numbers, then how would we ever know?” This question makes sense on one level but not really on another. For there is the issue that, for example, if the graphemic symbol ‘A’ is, say, red, then it could be such for the synesthete despite whether the synesthete attaches any meaning to the symbol or not! This would be equivalent to, for example, someone with synesthetically colored graphemes who knows no Chinese characters nevertheless seeing or connecting colors to some or all characters – but not to graphemic designs which are not Chinese characters! You will note that those with colored letters or numbers attach colors to letters and numbers (this sounds like a stupid truism but please follow along), not to all written shapes. That is, while ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, and ‘1’, ‘2’, ‘3’ might have colors, various random squiggles and ink-glorps do not. The synesthete has apparently learned to categorize and place certain designs into a set which is given a certain specific type of label (such as “these are letters”), and to exclude other designs as “not being of that category”. Such cognitive processing is done in the fusiform gyrus, which lies adjacent to visual areas V4 and V8, which are involved in processing colors. Meaning has to be there before the color(s) will start to emerge.

Other types

Other types of synesthesia in this category documented as existing, but for which we have very little data are grapheme  flavor and grapheme  touch.

Chapter 4: From language and ideas

She walked up to me and she asked me to dance. I asked her her name and in a dark brown voice she said “Lola. L-O-L-A, Lola, lo-lo-lo-lo Lola.” (“Lola”, the Kinks).

Neanderthals may have had language. This is indicated from fossils with reveal the structure of their vocal tracts.112 Neanderthals’ auditory capabilities were about the same as if not identical to ours (see Quam and Rak 2008). Lan- guage development in humans ties to developments in the brain’s left hemisphere, and thus also to right-handedness; we also have evidence that, like us, most Neanderthals were right-handed113. Fuller language capabilities are suggested by the presence of the same two variants of FOXP2 in Neanderthal DNA as in that of sapiens; these two variants are the only two that differ between us and chimpan- zees.114 We do not, however, know how far aspects of language, such as the development of more complex syntactic structures, developed. Current speculation places Neanderthal language capabilities as being at least as proficient as a modern-day sapiens 3-year-old; thus, capable of many basic two word sentences, holding to a root syntactic structure, and using some pragmatic elements, but perhaps not of, for example, embedding two or more clauses within a sentence phrase.115 Likewise, this would probably also be the case for Denisovans. While there are some important differences between the brains of Neanderthals and sapiens, the rate and pace of brain growth and development are basically the same for both.116 Thus we had at least two now-extinct sister species (with whom some groups of sapiens interbred; the admixture rate for sapiens and Neanderthals is estimated to be most likely about 2.5%117) who theoretically may have also had rare individual members with language-based synesthesia. Possibly three, if we also include Homo floresiensis (with whom it is far less likely that H. sapiens interbred). If we attempt to trace language back further, to our more ancient ancestor, paleonto- logical and archeological evidence indicates that earlier Homo erectus (from ca. 1.9 million years ago to roughly 800,000 years ago) apparently did not have the physiology for linguistic capabilities. However, a later-period branch of Homo erectus, labeled by some as Homo ergaster – this branch holding the common,

112 See Boë et al. 2002; Fitch 2009; Barney et al. 2012; D’Anastasio et al. 2013; Dedio and Levinson 2013. 113 See Barney et al. 2012. 114 See Krause et al. 2007. 115 See Dediu and Levinson 2013. 116 See Ponce de León et al. 2008. 117 See Dediu and Levinson 2013. 57

“mother” ancestor of us sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans, and emerging about 800,000 years ago – did have such physiological capabilities.118 Thus, we might be able to trace language, and also, theoretically, language-related synesthesia, back as far as 800 kya, with the ergaster sub-group of H. erectus. This would not include writing. Yet, keep in mind that, while sapiens has been around for at least 200,000 years, with linguistic capabilities from the start of that time, we have had writing for less than 4.5% of that period; if we take things from the origins of language, writing has existed for less than 1% of that time.

Lexeme  color

Lexeme  color synesthesia appears to be significantly rarer than phoneme  color synesthesia. However, case reports do exist, such as that by Weiss and colleagues119, who write about a woman who synesthetically connects colors to the names of (only) famous people. Nunn and colleagues120 produced data suggesting that the V4/V8 regions of the brain, involved in processing color perception, are more active for “word-color” synesthetes than non-synesthetes when hearing words spoken than when just listening to tones; however, earlier visual areas, such as V1 and V2, are not more active.

Lexeme  flavor, and phoneme  flavor

Two interesting types of synesthesia involve speech sounds or whole words evoking synesthetic flavors121. Speech sounds for a given language are called the “phonemes” of that language, so this type of synesthesia is called ‘phoneme to flavor’ synesthesia. If the word, as a whole unit, evokes the flavor, that is called ‘lexeme to flavor’. Now, here, we are not just talking about something like the word “coffee” making you think of the flavor of coffee. We’re talking about someone actually tasting the flavor, in his or her mouth, in high detail. But, furthermore, we’re also talking about a word like “confess” having the flavor of coffee, or the word “microscope” evoking the flavor of carrots. A friend of mine living in England, James Wannerton, has this type of synesthesia. For James, certain specific speech sounds produce corresponding flavors in his mouth. The hard /g/ sound in the words “argue” and “begin”, for example, produce the flavor of yoghurt; the combination of the /s/ and /p/ sounds in the words “super” or “peace” result in James tasting tomato soup. This happens to James whether he speaks the word, hears the word, reads it, or just thinks it.

118 See Dediu and Levinson 2013. 119 Weiss et al. 2001. 120 Nunn et al. 2002. 121 The perhaps earliest accounts of this type of synesthesia may be found in Ferrari 1907; 1910; see also Pierce 1907; Ward & Simner 2003; Jones et al. 2011. 58

This synesthesia emerged in James when he was young, and was fully established and set before his mid-teens. Because of this, the flavors that he tastes for words are all from foods he ate as a young child; not flavor experiences he had later on as an adult. So, for example, he experiences synesthetic flavors of candies he has not actually consumed since he was a teenager. The names of food items themselves will tend to taste like the food being named. Thus, for example, the word “sausage” will taste like sausage. Then certain phonemes of that word will be taken, and those sounds will extend into other words. So, for example, the “J” – /d3/ – sound in “sausage” also appears in the word “college”, making it also taste like sausage. A few years ago, I asked James what flavors the phrase “Culinary Institute of Charleston” evokes. He replied: “A thick slice of cucumber, a dash of semolina mixed with a thin type of bland flavoured meat of some description. The strongest flavour though is one I can only describe as sweaty, cheesy feet. Not the sort of thing I’d like to hear before breakfast!” So, what about the phrase “Trident Technical College”? James replied: “This is okay. Semi-soggy Sugar Puffs, a metallic paint type of flavour, an odd, watery taste very much like the left-over vinegar you’d find in a pickled onion jar. Then the deal-breaker – a lovely, lingering flavour of a slightly cold sausage sandwich.” James added: “The way it ‘works’ for me is that I get taste after taste constantly. Some are weak, some strong. It’s the strong ones that cause problems for me as they tend to linger – a little like the afterglow when a halogen bulb is switched off. These lingering flavours mix with new ones. This sometimes tastes horrible!” ‘Phoneme  flavor’ synesthetes often also report aspects of texture and temperature as part of their synesthetic experiences; that is, for example, the word “rake” not only tastes like fried bacon, but it is crisp, oily and rather cold.122 These sensations are felt on the tongue and in the mouth. Unlike with ‘grapheme  color’ synesthesia, in which, for example, the word “red” might induce a synesthetic perception of green, a phenomenon known as the “alien color effect”123, ‘phoneme  flavor’ synesthesia apparently displays no such effects for the names of foods, such as the word “bacon” tasting of spinach.124 Another interesting twist regarding ‘lexeme  flavor’ synesthesia emerges when you bring up the question of people’s names, and the effects that the flavors might have on personal relationships. James Wannerton gives some insights into this: “I’ve been friends with a loaf of doughy bread, a portion of flaky pastry, vegetable salad, a rasher of hard, cold bacon, dried mucous, runny mucous, a glass of cream soda, a slice of Madeira cake, a lump of ear wax, and a very jammy strawberry jam sandwich, to name but a few. I see someone virtually every day

122 See Ward, Simner, & Auyeung 2005. 123 Gray et al. 2002. 124 See Ward, Simner, & Auyeung 2005. 59 whose name tastes of vomit! I’ve never let on when someone’s name has a ‘bad’ taste, as it would probably colour the relationship somewhat!”

Hubbard, Brang, and Ramachandran have noted that areas in the brain involved with lexeme processing are adjacent to areas involved with processing tastes. This lends support to the idea that ‘lexeme  flavor’ synesthesia works as per the cross-activation theory.125

Lexeme  odor

Patricia Müller wrote,

“I have experienced smelling words since childhood, when, initially, some words in Portuguese brought up very specific smells that were hard for me to describe. I remember very clearly when I first heard the words ‘pure’ and ‘natural’ (in Portuguese), on a television ad (a bottled water ad), that both words made me feel something that other words didn’t make me feel. These words had a smell/taste (I still can’t quite describe them, although they kept the initial perception throughout the years), and it was so nice to feel that, that I kept saying words out loud. Eventually, my mother asked me why I was repeating the words and I told her, ‘Well, don’t these words taste nice?’ – and, obviously, she looked at me un-clued and asked me what they tasted like and all I could say was, ‘You know, listen: p-u-r-e, n-a-t-u-r-a-l’ – because I thought she knew what they smelled like. I have some difficulty telling the difference between what I smell and taste, because they seem very closely connected. And also, in order for me to experience these perceptions, I must hear the words or say them in my mind, but then the perception is not as rich as when actually heard. “As I grew up, I noticed that I started having ‘favorite words’ that no one seemed to understand and these words very usually had the letters m, l, c, [and] k. When I started learning English, I thought it was fascinating. For some reason, English is a very ‘synesthetic’ language for me. Words like milk, Kate, chalk, melt, galaxy, blend, walk, etc. (I can see a pattern there; does it make sense?) have a complex perception of smell, taste and texture and I find myself inhaling every time I hear them, as I can ‘almost almost almost’ smell, taste and feel them inside my mouth – sometimes, as I inhale, I can actually smell them. “In an article […], they say: ‘Bizarrely there are often phonetic relationships between the triggering word and the name that is used to describe the taste that is elicited. For example, “cinema” may taste of cinnamon rolls and “Chicago” may taste of avocado.’ This is true for many of my words and I have yet to understand how my brain deals with and makes connections with different languages (I speak Portuguese, English, German and some Spanish, and I love some words in Italian). ‘Kate’ smells/tastes like hot

125 See Hubbard et al. 2011. 60

chocolate cake – although the Portuguese word for cake sounds completely different. In general, many words in German have funny smells, many Italian words have rich smells, and words in English have soft smells. “I have noticed some other patterns that strangely link different types of synesthesia, if that makes sense. The letter ‘I’ is scarlet red for me and words that ... oh, this is hard to explain ... okay, words that prominently have the sounds made from ‘ee’, ‘y’ or ‘i’, usually have a red citric smell/ taste perception. I’m not sure if this makes sense, but, since I started learning and understanding synesthesia, I have been able to recognize some strange patterns such as the one I just described. “Many words have a ‘milky’ smell/taste/texture to me (all with specific variations, such as milk chocolate, vanilla fudge, etc.) and I like colors such as beige, white, brown, khaki, as well as the number 6, the letters m, l, c, k, and they all seem linked together in some way. So, if I see something like ‘6 melted galaxies’ written in beige and I say this out loud or inside my mind, it brings up a very rich milky perception – although the written ‘6’ is some sort of beige (which adds to the milky perception), but the word ‘six’ said aloud doesn’t smell/taste like anything.”

Lexeme  touch

One of the Synesthesia List members explains: “[F]or example, tomato. If it’s pronounced ‘to-may-to’, it’s rough like gravel. If it’s pronounced like ‘to- mah-to’, it’s softer, like a warm cotton shirt that just came out of the dryer.”

Number forms

Is grapheme to color synesthesia the most common type? If we consider number lines, also known as number forms and as sequence-spatial synesthesia (SSS)126 (see Figure 4.1), to be a type of synesthesia, then it may well be that number forms are instead by far the most common type. Data suggest that number  visual/spatial synesthesia might be as common as in 12% of world popula- tion127. Added to this, it appears that such synesthesia is more common amongst those who also have number  color synesthesia than in those who don’t. For calendric time lines, it is not always the case that they are linear; they could be horseshoe shaped, circular, spiral, or other shapes. And, if circular, it is not always the case that January will be in top position or ‘one o’clock’ position – January could, for example, be in 11 o’clock or 3 o’clock position. One could also have a “number form” for letters of the alphabet.128

126 See Galton 1881 ; Patrick 1893; also Rothen et al. 2015. 127 See Seron et al. 1992; Sagiv et al. 2006. 128 See, for example, Baron-Cohen, Wyke & Binnie 1987. 61

Figure 4.1 – A number form from one of Francis Galton’s (1880) subjects

Time  color

Regarding time units, we need to keep in mind that, while days and years are based upon natural events, months and weeks are cultural constructs. While most of the world now has become used to the concept of a 7-day week, it is quite possible, and very easy, to have other systems.129 The Igbo, of Nigeria, tradition- ally had a 4-day week, their “market week”. In Java, and also in Korea, there remain remnants of a 5-day week cycle intermeshed with a 7-day week cycle. There is archeological evidence that some ancient Baltic cultures used a 9-day week cycle. Then there is the 10-day week used by various cultures in China; this 10-day week was also adopted in Japan and Korea. The ancient Egyptian calendar also incorporated a 10-day week, with three weeks per month. We must also consider when the day and the year begin, as these are also arbitrary. In many cultures, the day begins at sunset, such that a “day” begins first with the period of darkness, followed by the period of light; this ties in with our current practices of Halloween (“All Hallows’ Evening”) on the evening of 31 October, and All Saints’ Day during the daytime of the following 1 November, or with Christmas Eve being the evening of the 24th of December (not the 25th), with Christmas morning then being on the 25th. Likewise, dividing the day into 24 hours, or into two sets of 12 hours, is arbitrary, as is dividing the year into 12 months. Starting the year on January 1st is arbitrary; for example, many cultures around the world start the year with the spring equinox. Thus, if we are observing and studying synesthesiae based upon time units, we must consider far more than just the aspects of the differences of languages such as between English, Polish, and Italian. We need to consider the number of units involved and what the initiating and end number are. It will make a difference if the day starts at sunset, or at midnight, or at dawn. It is going to make a

129 See Aveni 2002. 62 difference if you have 5 or 10 colored days of the week, as opposed to 7. It is going to make a difference if your week begins on Monday and ends on Sunday, rather than beginning on Sunday and ending on Saturday. It will make a difference if the first month of the year starts in spring or in mid-winter. Dr. Anton V. Sidoroff-Dorso conducted an interesting experiment regarding colored days of the week by introducing synesthete test subjects to an eighth day, “Justday”, inserted into a standard Russian seven-day model of the week, via a science fiction short story.130 A calendar, in this eight-day structure, was also provided to the test subjects, with Justday placed, for example, between Thursday and Friday. Test subjects were to calculate the day, and color, of other events, such as holidays and birthdays, in this new calendrical system. Eight test subjects displayed emergent colors for Justday within a half-hour test period. The Australian politician Herbert Vere Evatt (1894 - 1965) had colored days of the week. So does actor Geoffrey Rush. Rush stated, “Friday is dark maroon, a type of sienna, and Saturday is definitely white. Monday is a cool blue. […] Since I was seven, when I first learnt counting, numbers had specific colours. My kids […] say, ‘Dad you’re not abnormal, you’re not different – you’re just crazy.’”131

Time unit personification

“My numbers have personalities as do my months and days of the week. For instance: “Monday is shy, and most often forgotten about. He is very friendly and quite sunny, if given the chance. Rather like the month April. I don’t know much about Tuesday; sometimes, I’m not even quite sure of the gender. Lately, I’m sure she’s a she. Wednesday is friends with everyone, and is fun to be around. He’s very comforting when you’re down. Thursday is my favorite; she’s Tuesday’s aunt. Friday is a very bright and sunny young man. Saturday is extremely helpful, and is quite the gentleman. Sunday is a God, and is always dressed in white. He is very loving. “December, January, and February are friends. December and January are twin sisters in their 80’s, each having snow white hair. December is more openly friendly, while January is more reserved. February is their younger friend; she’s in her 70’s, and is a bit naive. March isn’t always bad tempered, but she does have mood swings. She pals around with August when she’s angry because August is feisty. The two of them mock others on occasion. April is a sad girl everyone forgets about. She usually sits in a window seat and looks out the window quietly. May is sweet, calm, and quiet; she likes to stay out of other’s business. She’s the one who takes care of April when others forget about her; so I guess she’s like April’s mom. June is a soft, middle-aged lady in a white dress; she walks through gardens a lot. July is a young teenager, about sixteen, in a rose colored dress; she’s

130 Sidoroff-Dorso 2010. 131 Astie 2007. 63

lovely and flippant. September is the only boy; he’s twins with October (they both have red hair). November is their mother, and she has a temper but loves to cook.”

Number forms, time-lines, and math

“Today is Friday. I’m looking at the Friday square, which is more like a rectangle but whatever; the point is, I’m looking at black Friday. I see the white with a bit of yellow Saturday and the almost pure white of Sunday. “I pan back, almost like a camera, to see the ‘larger’ scale of the week. The week is like seven rectangles, each with their corresponding color, tan yellow, brown, blue-green (I mean, both blue and green together), reddish brown, black, and the two white squares. It’s set up where Monday’s the first square and Sunday’s the last. There’s a hump in the middle on the Wednesday square, so it’s rather odd looking. “I can pan back further and see the month, set up almost like a linear calendar, and I can see the color of February, which is a cool mint color. Next to it is a dark January and a lighter March with yellow and red. If I turn my head, I can see the entire row of months continuing on into eternity. “I can pan back further but it would be the same, the only difference being that the lines of the centuries depend. Ancient history, delineated by the year 0 [sic], is this tan color, and newer history is reddish brown. Our year [2005] is in white (the two 00’s must do it).”

There is the question of what happens if a synesthete with a calendric time line who was born in the northern hemisphere moves to the southern hemisphere, or vice versa, where the seasons are reversed. A member of the Synesthesia List wrote,

“I actually have experienced a change in my forms upon moving to the southern hemisphere. I have a year pattern (not colored, but a form – although there is a general pattern that winter months are ‘darker’ than summer months; i.e., summer has more of a sensation of lightness). The form of the year is basically a flat oval, starting with January at 5 o’clock and moving clockwise. […] Anyway, winter and summer are the ‘flatter’, longer parts of the oval, with the spring and fall months on the shorter bits. “When I moved to the southern hemisphere (southern Mozambique), where I spent a year, I discovered three gradual, subtle changes to my form of the year. First of all, it became less flat and more like a true circle. On reflection, I think this is because I lived right on the Tropic of Capricorn, and there were far fewer differences in daylight and lengths of the season there than in North America where I grew up. Second of all, the winter months and summer months became less different in terms of darkness and lightness, and in fact flipped (although they were much less extreme – winter, i.e. June, was not nearly as dark as January had been). And thirdly, although the overall orientation of the year was the same as ever (January 64

still at 5 o’clock, still clockwise movement), I had the perception of […] the ‘starting point’ of the year at June, up near 11:30 or so, rather than at January. “When I moved back to the US, I returned rather quickly to my old form. And, in fact, now that I live in Boston – an even higher latitude than where I grew up at – I think winters are even darker than they used to be. However, I can still ‘put myself in the mindset’ of being back in Africa, and can quickly reason about the year using the form that developed there. This is all somewhat strange to me because they say synesthetic perceptions don’t change over time; but although my changes have been subtle, they are certainly there.”

Ticker tape

A very rare variant of projected language-based synesthesia is known as “ticker tape”, in which words, whether spoken, heard, or thought about, are trans- formed into written text, seen in front of the synesthete. In different case reports, ticker tape synesthesia has appeared as scrolling tape issuing from the mouths of speakers, as cartoon-like balloons, and as subtitles placed slightly above or below the synesthete’s line of vision, very similar to subtitled text in movies or on television. Synesthetic ticker tape text is not necessarily always colored. Ticker tape scrolling from the speaker’s mouth can be similar to what is depicted in Pictures 4.1 and 4.2.

Picture 4.1 – From the Codex Selden. Speech is scrolling from the mouths of the two people on the right. Red and white flint knives are attached to the speech scrolls, indicating that the speakers are verbally attacking the travelers on the left.

Picture 4.2 – A painting by Bernhard Strigel featuring a speech scroll.

Kirstie Sobue wrote:

“[B]ecause I’m a sound-color syn basically, I get a […] reaction if I’m in a room and lots of conversations are going on. I am bizarrely good at listening to lots of conversations at the same time, because I kind of get ‘subtitles’ for them all. But I am also an interpreter, and, in some situations, if I am stand- ing with one group of people and interpreting what one person is saying, but there are others in the same room speaking in completely unrelated conversations, I get a kind of visual interference. It’s particularly strong if the other conversations are physically in between me and the person whose words I am translating. For example, I was in a situation recently where there was a speaker up front, and a group of English speakers at the back of a room, whom I was sitting with and interpreting for. A couple of groups of people sitting in the body of the room were not really listening to the speaker and were whispering to each other. Behind me were a group of mums with babies, who were making baby-type noises. The general noise level was not so high that I couldn’t hear the speaker, but it was as though I had a visual disturbance that made it very hard to interpret what was going on. Since it’s my livelihood, I’ve had to develop techniques to deal with this sort of thing so I can keep going. Bizarrely, the thing that helps most in this situation is to shut my eyes – that way, I can ‘focus’ on what the speaker is saying and kind of ‘shut out’ the other subtitles that are buzzing around the room!”

Other types

Other documented types of synesthesia in this category, but for which we have very little information, include the following: emotion  colors132; emotion  flavor; emotion  odor; emotion  sound; personality  odor; personality  touch; and time  sound.

132 See Ramachadran et al. 2012. 67

Chapter 5: From music

“When [Franz] Liszt [1811 – 1886; see Picture 5.1] first began as Kapell- meister in Weimar (1842), it astonished the orchestra that he said: ‘O please, gentlemen, a little bluer, if you please! This tone type requires it!’ Or: ‘That is a deep violet, please, depend on it! Not so rose!’ First the orchestra believed Liszt just joked; more later, they got accustomed to the fact that the great musician seemed to see colors there, where there were only tones”.133

Picture 5.1 – Franz Liszt

When I was about six or seven years old, I would raid my parents’ record cabinet, looking for my favorite records. One which I would handle with a sort of awe and dread was the album of Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite. The “Cloudburst” movement scared the hell out of me. Not so much for the dire chords and crashing symphonic sounds, as for the colors the music evoked: black, dark grays, flashes of yellow and red. Yet, what I saw was not imaginative imagery of a thunderstorm in the desert. Rather, what I saw out in front of me, about arm’s-length away, were synesthetic visuals, induced by the timbres of the orches- tral instruments.

133 Quoted from an anonymous article in the Neuen Berliner Musikzeitung (29 August, 1895); quoted in Mahling 1926: 230; my translation. 69

When I was between the ages of six and eleven or so, it was the late 1960’s and early ‘70’s, the age, among other things, of psychedelic music. The Beatles and, later, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, were good – nice visuals. As were Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and many others. Big band music was nice, too; things by Ellington and Basie. I come from a very musical family. My mother played guitar and violin, wrote music, and would often take us with her to sing at religious-oriented gatherings. We would often also go to hear other musicians, professional and amateur. From early on, I had lots of contact not only with music but also with people who knew and made music. Which means that, from early on, I realized that no one else around me was talking about the colors of music. By the time I was nine or ten years old, I caught on that it was just me. We had an old, broken down and out-of-tune piano in the basement of the house I grew up in from age 5 to 15. By the time I was age eleven or twelve, I was fooling around with it, exploring different chords and timbres that I could create. It was about at this age that I also entered into band class at school. Since I didn’t like the idea of spitting into things, and didn’t like the feel of wood in my mouth, since my school’s ‘band’ didn’t include any string section, and since my emerging interest was in keyboard instruments, I went for the only thing in band class that had keyboards: percussion, which was, granted, mostly just drums. But, while all the others in the percussion section only and exclusively wanted to bang on drums, I focused instead on the xylophone, marimba, glockenspiel, timpani, and anything else available with a musical scale. It was also around this time that I started becoming interested in playing the organ. This eventually led to my parents buying a small electric organ and my taking organ classes, starting about the age of 13 or 14. By the age of 14, the organ had been moved from the living room of the house into my bedroom. I would stay up late into the night, earphones wrapped on my head (so as not to bother others), the room lit only by the glowing tubes of the organ, blasting away at choppy versions of Beatles tunes or my own improvisations, watching the myriad synesthetic colors emerge before me. By the age of 13 or 14, I had encountered a couple of musicians who talked about yet other musicians whom they knew who saw colors. I never really talked with them much about my own colors, but listened raptly when they mentioned some violinist, saxophone player, or whatever who “did things by colors”. So, by my mid-teens, I knew there were at least some others out there like myself. Few and far between, but at least some. Thus, by the time I was 15 or 16, I was, to the meager extent that I could, deliberately seeking out these others, and trying to find out more about why and how only a few musicians out there saw the colors. I noticed fairly quickly that most of the musicians I heard about were either doing jazz or in classical orchestras; I rarely if ever heard of any in rock, country, or folk music groups, or dealing with just about any other genre. So, what are some of the things I see for music? My synesthesia for music is based upon the timbre of musical instruments. That is, each instrument not only produces its own unique sound, but also its own color. The bowed string instruments are shades of brown, with a texture like wood grain. Hearing string music is like looking at wood paneling. The deeper the

70 sound, the darker the wood. So violins are light tan, violas a medium brown, cellos a dark reddish brown, and double basses a dark, almost black brown. Drums tend to appear as puffs of smoke, down at my feet. Cymbals are silvery yellow flashes, somewhat metallic, like tin foil, at about knee level. Pianos make a sky blue mist of microscopic particles of liquid plastic. Flutes are a silvery bluish grey; but clarinets are a full crayon blue with a texture like hard plastic, and oboes make an olive green with a texture like woody vines. Brass instruments usually appear as orange flames, but French horns are a sheet of school bus yellow paper. Electric guitars are rather hard to explain. You first need to envision electric plasma, ionized particles, such as what you see in those old Frankenstein movies, being generated by Tesla coils and van der Graaf generators. Now, take that electric plasma and have it be a sphere, colored red, floating at eye level. The shades of red that I see for electric guitars are very specific, such that I can distinguish different musicians’ guitars. Muddy Water’s electric guitar, for example, is a bright cherry red; Jimi Hendrix could get some interesting pinks and purples to come out in his guitar; Carlos Santana’s guitar tends to be more orange than usual. Perhaps the most interesting group, visually, are the saxophones. Picture thin neon tubing, about a quarter of a meter long, lit up, colored purple. Now picture hundreds of these tubes. Except that they are alive, like snakes, and all coiled together into a ball. This glowing purple neon snake ball floats in front of me, at just above eye level, whenever I hear a saxophone. Again, the higher the pitch, the lighter the color, such that a soprano sax will be a very light faint purple, and a baritone sax will be a dark, rich purple. But, once again, this is just me. For another synesthete, electric guitars might be yellow, or green, and saxophones might be blue. Or, instead, the timbre might make no difference, and the colors will be based upon the musical notes. Picture 5.2 depicts what I see synesthetically at a specific point in time about half-way through Carlos Santana’s cover of Angelique Kidjo and J. Hebrali’s song “Adouma”, on Santana’s Shaman album134. The black background is an arbitrary choice. I prefer to listen to music in dark or barely lit settings, as it brings out the synesthetic visuals better; I drew this depiction as being in such a setting. The sky blue mist is the keyboard instruments; the red in the center is the electric guitars; the reddish orange flames at the top of the red ball are the brass instruments; very faintly visible, near the bottom, are small puffs of dark grey, which are the drums; very faint – almost not visible – arcing over the blue band and the red flaming ball, is a slight blue, white, and pink mist, which are the voices.

134 Santana 2002. 71

Picture 5.2 – Depiction of synesthetic visuals at mid-point in “Adouma”

What types of music  X synesthesia are there?

The majority of people, apparently world-wide, tend to rate higher pitched sounds (that is, a faster rate of vibratory frequency) as being spatially higher, physically smaller, and prettier and brighter than lower pitched (a slower rate of frequency) sounds, which are deemed to be spatially low, big and fat, and darker and uglier135.

Based upon graphemes

When one speaks of ‘music  color’ or other types of music-induced synesthesiae, there are actually many different aspects of music, any one of which might be the given inducer for the particular synesthete in question. For many if not most of such synesthetes, it is the designation of the musical note which gets associated with a color or other synesthetic perception. That is, for example, B-flat =

135 See Marks 1997 (1975); also Melara 1989a, b. 72 blue, and C-sharp = pink. Those who have this type of synesthesia usually (but not always) also have a ‘grapheme  X’ type (most typically ‘grapheme  color’). Thus, for example, the red color of the letter ‘A’ transfers over to the note ‘A’, and, from there, a notation grapheme (e.g., a quarter note, ♩) written on a staff on the line designating ‘a’ will become red.136

Hungarian composer György Ligeti (1923 – 2006), for example, had this type of synesthesia:

“I am inclined to synaesthetic perception. I associate sounds with colours and shapes. Like Rimbaud [sic; Rimbaud was not a true synesthete], I feel that all letters have a colour.” “Major chords are red or pink, minor chords are somewhere between green and brown. I do not have perfect pitch, so when I say that C minor has a rusty red-brown colour and D minor is brown this does not come from the pitch but from the letters C and D. I think it must go back to my childhood. I find, for instance, that numbers also have colours; 1 is steely grey, 2 is orange, 5 is green. At some point these associations must have got fixed, perhaps I saw the green number 5 on a stamp or on a shop sign. But there must be some collective associations too. For most people the sound of a trumpet is probably yellow although I find it red because of its shrillness.”137

A strange twist: Ligeti studied and taught (1950 - 1956) at the Franz Liszt (another synesthete composer and musician) Academy in Budapest.

Based upon absolute pitch

Then there are those for whom it is the (absolute) musical pitch itself which determines the synesthetic perception. Here, rather than it being, say, the note E- flat which has a particular color, instead it is the pitch of, say, 440 Hz., whatever that pitch may be called (usually, that is the standard A above “middle C”) depending upon different tunings.

American composer and pianist Amy Beach (1867-1944; Picture 5.3) had this type of synesthesia:

“Other interesting stories about Amy’s musical personality and her astound- ing abilities as a prodigy are recounted in almost all previous biographical writings. One such story is Amy’s association of certain colors with certain keys. For instance, Amy might ask her mother to play the ‘purple music’ or the ‘green music.’ The most popular story, however, seems to be the one about Amy’s going on a trip to California and notating on staff paper the

136 See Ward et al. 2006. 137 Ligeti 1981/1983: 58. 73

exact pitches of bird calls she heard.”138 “Amy’s mother encouraged her to relate melodies to the colors blue, pink, or purple, but before long Amy had a wider range of colors, which she associated with certain major keys. Thus C was white, F-sharp black, E yellow, G red, A green, A-flat blue, D-flat violet or purple, and E-flat pink. Until the end of her life she associated these colors with those keys.”139

Picture 5.3 – Amy Beach

Based upon the musical key

A variant on the ‘musical note  X’ theme is where the musical key determines the synesthetic perception. For example, music in the key of G-major will synesthetically look quite different than music in the key of c-sharp minor. For that matter, even though the key of C-major and a-minor are almost identical (depending upon which minor scale is used), the synesthetic perceptions will nevertheless change upon awareness of the key change.

French pianist Hélène Grimaud has this type. She stated,

“It was when I was eleven, and working on the F sharp major Prelude from the first book of Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier – I perceived something that was very bright, between red and orange, very warm and vivid: an almost

138 Brown 1994: 16. 139 From an interview of Beach by George Y. Loveridge in the Providence Journal, Dec. 4, 1937, p. 5; quoted in Jenkins 1994: 5 – 6. 74

shapeless stain, rather like what you would see in the recording control-room if the image of sound were projected on a screen. But as numbers had always had colours for me – two was yellow, four was red, five was green – and as I have always found music evocative, I didn’t regard this as unusual. It was more the idea of colour than colour itself. Certain pieces always project me into a particular colour-world. Sometimes it’s a result of the tonality – C minor is black, and D minor, the key that has always been closest to me, being the most dramatic and poignant, is blue.”

Based upon modes

Somewhat rare are those for whom it is the modality of the music which determines the synesthetic perception. Here, the difference is in whether the music is in, for example, the Dorian or Mixolydian mode or on the 12-tone chromatic scale as opposed to a whole-tone scale.

Based upon chord structure

Another type involved those for whom it is the chord structure which determines the synesthetic perception. Here, the difference is in, say, color, stems from whether the chord is, for example, a major seventh chord or a minor sixth chord. A variant of this involves what inversion the chord is in; for example, while the notes of the musical scale remain the same, there will be a difference between a D7 chord structure D-F#-A-C (with D as the root) and one structured F#-A-C-D (with F# as the bass note).

Based upon timbre

Then there are those such as myself, for whom it is the timbre of the instrument(s) playing which determines the color(s) seen. For example, the same musical passage will synesthetically look different if played on a violin as opposed to a saxophone. Composer, musician and conductor Leonard Bernstein (1918 – 1990; see Picture 5.4) had this type of synesthesia, as did Duke Ellington (1899 – 1974; see Picture 5.5). Ellington once stated,

“I hear a note by one of the fellows in the band and it’s one color. I hear the same note played by someone else and it’s a different color. When I hear sustained musical tones, I see just about the same colors that you do, but I see them in textures. If Harry Carney is playing, D is dark blue burlap. If Johnny Hodges is playing, G becomes light blue satin.”140

140 George 1981: 226. 75

Picture 5.4 – Leonard Bernstein

Picture 5.5 – Duke Ellington

Based upon the genre

The genre of the music in question might also be the synesthetic inducer, for some. In this case, the difference in color comes, for example, from whether the music is a classical waltz as opposed to a 1950’s doo-wop, as opposed to ragtime, as opposed to a passage from a Wagner opera.

The overall individual piece of music

There is also the situation where individual songs take on a color. With this type, songs of a similar style or genre tend to have similar colors. Lady Gaga (Stefani German-otta) has this type. She once said, “When I write songs I hear melodies and I hear lyrics, but I also see colour. I see sound like a, like a wall of colour. And, like for example, Poker Face is a deep amber colour.”141 Billy Joel and Pharrell Williams also have this type.142 Artist David Hockney is a synesthete.143 He sees synesthetic colors to musical stimuli. In general, this does not show up in his painting or photography artwork too much. However, it is a common underlying principle in his construc- tion of stage sets for various ballets and operas, where he bases the background colors and lighting upon his own seen colors while listening to the music of the theater piece he is working on.

Causation

If we look at forms of music-related synesthesia which are not grapheme induced but instead are based upon an auditory inducer, there is evidence144 that a greater than average amount of white matter in the right inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus, a pathway connecting visual and auditory association areas to frontal regions, may be involved.

Music  flavor

One variant of this type is ‘musical piece to flavor’, which has been reported:

“[I]t seems that [he] tastes chocolate for Brahms’ Hungarian Dance #5, and has mentioned sausages, ham sandwiches, apple juice, blackcurrants […] and both strawberry and chocolate ice cream tastes as well whilst listening to the classical compilation cassette we had on the way home from school. […] All the tastes were very familiar to him as a young child and were all

141 jayohenjee 2010. 142 See Seaberg 2011. 143 See Cytowic 1989. 144 Zamm et al. 2013. 77

things he would normally eat. […] Interestingly, [he] reports pretty much one taste per song, no matter how complex the piece, although on one song he reported a slight additional taste of gingerbread part way through.

Beeli, Esslen and Jäncke145 also wrote of about E.S., a 27-year-old profess- sional musician with ‘musical intervals to flavor’ synesthesia; for example, for E.S., a minor third tastes salty, and a minor sixth tastes of cream. E.S. also had ‘musical tone to color’ synesthesia. Richard Cytowic, in a personal message, wrote to Edward Hubbard (and, indirectly, also to me), regarding a ‘musical intervals to taste’ synesthete, “[o]ne of the cortical taste areas is in the frontal operculum, overhanging Heschl’s gyri for sound. The latter [is] tono-topically organized; so the fact that intervals are important in this subject’s synesthesia probably means that it is the area of primary activation.” In other words, an area of the brain which processes tastes lies next to an area which processes music; this gives support to the idea that ‘music  flavor’ synesthesia works as per what is suggested by the cross-activation theory.146

Music  odor

In 1855, Septimus Piesse published his classic work, The art of perfumery, which included his structuring of aromatic scales147 (see Figure 5.1). There is no indication that Piesse himself was a synesthete. His musical scales were apparently meant as an analogy towards structuring a taxonomy and ordering of aromas.

A member of the Synesthesia List wrote the following:

“When hearing musical instruments, I experience odors (as well as colors and 3-dimensional moving forms). For example, the trumpet is somehow like fresh apples and the odor of the viola reminds me of cinnamon even though it is not pure cinnamon but mixed up with some odor I have not identified yet. I am always trying to identify the odors in my environment but this is very difficult. There seems to be no correlation between the colors, the forms and the odors. Furthermore, I am not aware of any odor occurring repeatedly.”

145 Beeli, Esslen and Jäncke 2005; see also Hänggi et al. 2008. 146 See Hubbard et al. 2011. 147 See also Piesse 1887. 78

Figure 5.1 – Piesse’s aromatic scales

Other types

Other documented types of synesthesia in this category, but for which we have little information, include music  personality, music  spatial location, and music  temperature differences.

Projection of music  visual synesthesia: an example

As explained elsewhere throughout this volume, those whose synesthetic perceptions are visual can be grouped into two categories: projectors and associators. For all three of my own types of synesthesia, I “project” my colored shapes into space. Since my timbre to visual/spatial synesthesia involves an inducer which can be outside of the body, this raises the question of where my synesthetic projections appear in relation to the sound source. We can start with perhaps the simplest example: a sound source directly before me, at eye-level. My synesthetic perception will be roughly half the distance between the sound source and myself. “Roughly” because my perceptions for music are dynamic, rather than static, moving in three dimensions as the music progresses through time. So, for example, if the sound source is 50 meters away, my synesthetic perceptions would fall most likely in a range of about 20 to 30 meters away. The situation for sounds behind me is more complicated so let me explain by setting up a system of Cartesian coordinates; we can then consider location on horizontal and vertical axes. Let us place the horizontal plane’s zero point at eye level, with 0° on the circle being directly before me and 90° at my direct right. The vertical plane is sagittal, usually more so to my torso than to my head (but this is explained further in the following); let us place 0° for this circle directly before me, with 90° directly above me (see Figures 5.2 and 5.3). A simple

79 explanation can then follow: let’s say I am listening to a music source 40 meters away in front of my body, at 45° to my right and 30° above the horizon: my synesthetic perception would be somewhere around 20 meters away in front of my body, at 45° to my right and 30° above the horizon (see Figure 5.2). However, things change slightly if the sound is behind me, and it is as if I have a mirror at my coronal plane, a vertical plane dividing my body’s front and back sides. If the sound source is behind my coronal plane, my synesthetic projection gets mirrored to a corresponding location before me – but at about only a quarter of the distance between me and the source. So, if the sound source is behind me, 40 meters away, at 120° to my right, and at 20° below the horizon, my synesthetic perception would appear before me, at 60° to my right, 20° below the horizon, at a distance of about 10 meters (see Figure 5.3).

Figure 5.2 – Graphical representation of the location of my synesthetic perception to music, given a music source 40 meters in front of my body, at 45° to my right, and at 30° above the horizon: my synesthetic perception would be in front of me, somewhere around 20 meters away, at 45° to my right and 30° above the horizon. © 2012, Joy A. Day

Figure 5.3 – Graphical representation of the location of my synesthetic perception to music, given a music source 40 meters behind me, at 120° to my right, and at 20° below the horizon: my synesthetic perception would be in front of me, some-where around 10 meters away, at 60° to my right and 20° below the horizon. © 2012, Joy A. Day.

Composers and Musicians mistaken for being synesthetes

Contrary to what appears in quite a lot of popular literature and on many web sites, Alexander Scriabin (see Picture 5.6) probably was not a synesthete, but, rather, was highly influenced by the French and Russian salon fashions. Most noticeably, Scriabin seems to have been strongly influenced by the writings and talks of the Russian mystic, Helena P. Blavatsky (see Picture 5.7), founder of The Theosophical Society and author of such works as Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine148. The synesthetic motifs found in Scriabin’s compositions – most noticeably in Prometheus, composed in 1911 – are developed off of ideas from Newton, and follow a basic mathematical musical algorithm, called a circle of fifths149 (see Figure 5.2). The score of Prometheus contains a line designated “Luce”; this was for a light organ, playing two lines: one to correspond to Scriabin’s concepts of the “correct” colors for each musical key, as he modulated from key to key; the other, to counter the first line’s colors. Scriabin and others were unable to realize a light-music performance of Prometheus until its premier

148 See Dann 1998. 149 See Galeyev 1987; Galeyev and Vanechkina 2001; Dann 1998; and, of course, Scriabin 1995 (1911). 81 performance in New York, in 1915, where, rather than using a color organ, colored light was projected onto a screen set above the orchestra performers’ heads.

Picture 5.6 – Alexander Scriabin

Picture 5.7 –Helena P. Blavatsky

Figure 5.2 – Scriabin’s “circle of fifths”

Scriabin's system of colored musical keys:

C# – Purple F# – Bright Blue/Violet B – Blue E – Sky Blue A – Green D – Yellow G – Orange C – Red F – Deep Red Bb – Rose/Steel Eb – Flesh Ab – Violet Db – Purple (same as C #) Gb – Bright Blue/Violet (same as F#)

Blavatsky's paradigm:

Si – Violet La – Indigo Sol – Black Fa – Green Mi – Yellow Re – Orange Do – Red

There is little evidence that Jimi Hendrix (see Picture 5.8) had any type of synesthesia150. There were many, many musicians who interacted with Hendrix who were familiar with the basic concept of synesthesia (for example, Paul McCartney and John Lennon); none of them ever mention Hendrix displaying any type of congenital synesthesia. Nor do any of his family members, many of whom were/are quite willing to talk about Hendrix. It is well-known that Jimi Hendrix was familiar with many types of hallucinogenic drugs which may, on occasion, produce synesthesia. So, yes, he most likely experienced drug-induced synesthesia a handful of times, as did, for example, John Lennon. But such experiences do not make him a congenital synesthete. As to the lyrics of “Bold as love”, these simply display common, learned, culture-based associations between colors and emotions which may be found in most western European (and thus also European-based American) art. Compare the associations, for example, with the color symbolism of western European heraldry, such as seen on family crests. With Hendrix’s lyrics, we have the standard clichés and connections: green jealousy; blue water; red of war; orange as “daring”; “mellow” yellow (this one is far too obvious). Note also that the colors expressed are “base” colors – purple, green, blue, red, orange, yellow – such as in a box of eight crayons. There are no greys, blacks, browns, or colors such as puce, chartreuse, or “lime green with tinges of cotton candy pink” which would be more typical of an actual synesthete. Likewise, the colors in Hendrix’s lyrics are evenly distributed; note, for example, that there are not two different shades of green, or blue, or any other base color. No; I’m sorry, but I don’t think Hendrix was a synesthete. Among other things, if he was, I’m fairly certain his father and siblings would have talked about it. Hendrix also kept a diary, and wrote extensive notes and many letters; there is nothing in any of these suggesting he had congenital synesthesia. He was part of the psychedelic music movement – flowers and beads and tie-dyed colors and all – and put that into his music using common symbolism.

Picture 5.8 – Jimi Hendrix

150 See Cross 2006. 84

Chapter 6: From sounds

Night was dark, but the sky was blue, Down the alley, the ice-wagon flew, Heard a bump, and somebody screamed, You should have heard just what I seen. (“Who do you love”, Ellas McDaniel 1956)

Sound  color

This is a fairly common type of synesthesia. About 15% of all synesthetes have this type; this translates to a general population rate of roughly 1 out of every 180 people.

Composer Jean Sibelius (1865 – 1957; see Picture 6.1) had this type of synesthesia:

“For him there existed a strange, mysterious connection between sound and color, between the most secret perceptions of the eye and ear. Everything he saw produced a corresponding impression on his ear – every impression of sound was transferred and fixed as color on the retina of his eye and thence to his memory. And this he thought as natural, with as good reason as those who did not possess this faculty called him crazy or affectedly original. “For this reason he only spoke of this in the strictest confidence and under a pledge of silence. ‘For otherwise they will make fun of me!’”151

An interesting side note to the whole topic of ‘sound  color’ is the use of color terms to express types of “noise” in English and other languages (e.g., French, German, Russian and Spanish). We have the following: White noise, in which the signal has equal power in any band of a given bandwidth. Pink noise, in which the power density decreases 3 dB per octave with increasing frequency over a finite frequency range (density proportional to 1/f); thus each octave contains the same amount of power. “Red” noise is more often termed Brownian noise, where the power density decreases by 6 dB per octave with increasing frequency density (density proportional to 1/f2); “Brownian” refers to Brownian motion, which this pattern simulates, which is named after biologist Robert Brown, and thus does not have an initial direct connection with the color brown. Blue noise (also known as azure noise) has a power density increase of 3 dB per

151 Adolf Paul (1890), as quoted in Ekman 1938: 41-42. 85 octave with increasing frequency (density proportional to f). Violet noise (also known as purple noise) has a power density increase of 6 dB per octave with increasing frequency (density proportional to f2). Grey noise is white noise sub- jected to a curve of psycho-acoustically equal loudness over a given range of frequencies, giving the listener the perception that it is equally loud at all frequencies. Thus, missing from the traditional English base of eleven colors, as per Berlin and Kay152, are the following: black; green; yellow; and orange. The term “orange” noise has been used by some, but it is still “unofficial”. It refers to a “quasi-stationary noise with a finite power spectrum with a finite number of small bands of zero energy dispersed throughout a continuous spectrum. These bands of zero energy are centered about the frequencies of musical notes in whatever scale is of interest. Since all in-tune musical notes are eliminated, the remaining spectrum could be said to consist of sour citrus, or ‘orange’ notes”.153 “Green” noise and “black” noise do not have single, standard definitions.

Picture 6.1 – Jean Sibelius

152 Berlin and Kay 1969. 153 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors_of_noise 86

Voice  color

“Certain teachers’ voices when I was in primary (elementary) school had ‘good’ or ‘bad’ colours; others had no colours at all. So, whilst I loved Miss Favell’s voice (a creamy violet) in year 5, I absolutely detested Mr Ken- nedy’s (dirty brown with blue swirls) in year 6. Every time he spoke, that’s all I saw. So, as I gazed down on my jade green letter S, T, and J’s, and my fat number 3’s, skinny number 5’s and female number 8’s … they were all tainted by Mr Kennedy’s dirty brown with blue swirls and I nearly failed year 6. […] “I tried to portray all of this in my thesis, and emphasize the call for non- coloured educational resources wherever possible (Mr Kennedy used far too many coloured blocks and alphabet charts, etc., on the wall, which just made it worse) … but alas, I still think that my markers missed the point and I only got a second class honours. […] “As a teacher, I prefer to use non-coloured resources, and I’m pleased to say they’ve made all the blocks in mathematics in my state of Australia a neutral wood color now, instead of rows of ten being blue, singles being red, blocks of 100 being yellow, etc. – far less confusing for me and my students. I always try to bear in mind that at least one of my students may have a form of synaesthesia, thanks to my own experience in learning.”

Sound  flavor

The very first account of this type of synesthesia might be by Arthur H. Pierce, in 1907.154 The subject of Pierce’s study was a young woman, possibly anosmatic, who also experienced phoneme  flavor and/or lexeme  flavor. For this woman, notes on a piano, for example, might taste of licorice, or like a banana. She also reported experiencing synesthetic flavors she has never actually tasted by eating foods or drinking liquids.

Other types

Other documented types in this category, for which we have far less information, include the following: sound  kinetics; sound  odor; sound  temperature differences; and sound  touch.

154 Pierce 1907. 87

Chapter 7: From flavors and odors

‘Sight by itself informs us only of colors and forms. No one can pretend that the images of sight are determinate in reference to taste. They are, therefore, so far general that they are neither sweet nor non-sweet, bitter nor non- bitter, having savor nor insipid.’ (Charles S. S. Peirce, 1868)

When I was about 21 years old, while an undergraduate student majoring in Anthropology at Purdue University, one of the Anthropology professors, Dr. Myrdene Anderson, who was notorious for the amazingly strong coffee she brewed in the lab or the faculty lounge, offered me a cup from her pot of espresso. I took one sip, and my jaw almost hit the floor. Not because of the taste or power of the coffee (which, itself, could have probably stripped the enamel off of a sink), but because, there in front of me, at eye level and a little to my left, about arm’s length away, was a big patch of floating oily green liquid, about the color of green Tabasco sauce still in the bottle. By age 21, I knew what a synesthetic vision was, having had an astronomical number of them beforehand with music. But I had never yet – to my full awareness – had one induced by the taste of something. This burst upon me the realization that there could, potentially, be a full, wide range of other types of synesthesia besides just those variances involved with seeing colors to music. Around about the same time as this coffee incident, in one of Professor Anderson’s Cultural Anthropology classes (I forget what the exact topic of the particular class was), during a class where we were kicking around cultural variances in how people might categorize and describe perceptions (such as the famous matter of color categories, as per Berlin & Kay155), Anderson spent a minute or two talking about synesthesia. I immediately recognized myself in this, and grabbed at the term. Since I frequented Professor Anderson’s office anyways, after class, I rushed there and asked her if she had any more information (books, articles, or such) on synesthesia. She replied that, no, she didn’t, and so she wanted me to get on over to the library and find her some. Thus began my academic (as opposed to hobby) research of synesthesia. In speaking of flavor, we need to keep in mind the distinctions between “flavors” and “tastes”. “Tastes” are the perceptions produced from just the taste buds, found on the tongue, soft palate, upper esophagus, the cheek, and epiglottis. These are bitter, salty, sour, sweet, and umami. “Flavors”, on the other hand, are extremely complex perceptions built from taste, odor156, touch, hearing, vision,

155 See Berlin & Kay 1969. 156 See Russell et al. 2015 89 pain perception, heat and cold perceptions, proprioception, and perhaps other senses157. A neonate just a few days old can already distinguish between sweet and bitter tastes, and expresses pleasure for sweet and displeasure for bitter. Each receptor on the human tongue responds to all five taste qualities: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami.158 There are distinct differences between the chemical sensory world of children and adults: children tend to prefer more strongly sour and sweet taste, whereas adults tend to prefer bitter and umami.159 It should also be mentioned that cystic fibrosis is often accompanied by an extremely increased ability to taste and smell, at rates 40 to 13,000 times more dilute than average.160

Flavor  color

This is a less common type of synesthesia. About 6.3% of all synesthetes have this type; this translates to a general population rate of roughly 1 out of every 430 people. Aristotle, in his On Sense and the Sensible (350 B.C.), established a corre- 161

spondence between flavors and colors, as follows :

Flavor Color

fat yellow

tangy purple-red

sour violet

sharp green

salty blue

bitter black

157 For more on this, see Spence and Piqueras-Fiszman 2014. 158 See Lindermann 2001. 159 See Liem and Mennella 2003. 160 See Henkin and Powell 1962. 161 See also Riccò 1999: 29; Jewanski 1999: 84 90

In 1550, Girolamo Cardanus (also known as Cardano) developed a system of corresponding colors with flavors and the planets:

yellow harsh/pungent Jupiter (austerus) red (puniceus) tart Moon purple (purpureus) sour Mercury green sharp (acutus) Sun blue salty Mars black bitter Saturn

Downey162 wrote the following about her subject, ‘S.’, a male college senior:

“So far as he can remember, he has always experienced tastes as colored. He reports that, as children, he and his sister employed color-names in describing their tastes. His taste-colors are located in the mouth; and they are intensified by closing his eyes. He recalls an illness during which his tastes were especially highly colored. In eating his meals, he ignores the induced colors; and, indeed, one color is frequently cancelled by another, during the act of eating. When the induced taste-color does not correspond with the actual color of the food, a most disagreeable experience results. For instance, brown and yellow mints are extremely distasteful, because of conflict of these colors with the green taste-color which is common to all mints. In general, pink and lavender tastes are agreeable; reds and browns are disagreeable. Blue tastes are never experienced. S. reports that colors suggest tactual experiences and that tactual impressions suggest colors.”

It should be mentioned, however, that there is indication that S. had a somewhat defective sense of taste. For example, he could not discern between test solutions of cayenne pepper and solutions of quinine, because both produced the same feel on the tongue and the same synesthetic color; he also confused ginger with cinnamon and pepper163.

Robin Schachat wrote to me,

“I do have colored taste on occasion; probably, if I think about it, I have it more than I realize. It helps sometimes in restaurants – like when I was try-

162 Downey 1911: 528. 163 Downey 1911: 531. 91

ing to figure out the mystery ingredient in a very fancy Palm Beach place’s lobster bisque. Easy – it had the indigo that was definitely vanilla. And the strong yellow with a hint of melon orange in the corn chowder in the place on Cape Cod meant that the base was buttermilk, although the soup itself was just creamy-looking. But some of the overpoweringly strong scent-and- flavor characteristic ingredients, like oranges, seem to have overridden any syn connections they may have had; or, at least it doesn’t supplant the logical association of an orange, popping up immediately. I think I respond to the color/flavor syn more when I am actively searching to identify a flavor in a dish; then the colors come forward as a ‘hint’. Which suggests that, for me, this syn is pretty weak.”

Causation

If we are looking for causations for the specific correlations between foods and colors in my own synesthesia, unfortunately I have yet to discover much. I have conducted many experiments upon myself, but almost all would probably not pass current standards of scientific rigor; as to experiments conducted by others, I have only participated as a subject in two or three. About the only thing found so far are good reasons to speculate that it is citric acid which produces the sky blue color I see in all citric fruits I have so far tried; here, I have been tested, and citric acid in water will produce the same synesthetic color. Also, tests with saline solutions indicate that sodium chloride, for me, consistently produces a light, dusty grey color. Less certain is what might be producing the shades of blue I see for dairy products; it might be lactic acid, but this has not yet been adequately tested. Likewise, there is the frequent orange color seen for fish and some other sea foods, and the shades of purple seen for many green, leafy vegetables; I have no clue yet regarding these, although, for the sea food, there might be early childhood cultural experiences involved. On the other hand, I now have reason to think that the shades of pink or purple I see for cucurbits might tie to one or more chemi- cals found in most, rather than to a cultural connection with the pink flesh of watermelons. However, yet again, we need to keep in mind that we can’t always just look towards a reductionist neuro-chemical answer to this question. Keep in mind, for example, that James Wannerton’s synesthetic flavors for phonemes are culturally based: they are only food flavors from his childhood, and for example, the flavor of bacon turns up not only in the word “bacon” but also specifically in certain other words with the same /k/ sound in a similar phonetic environment.

Flavor  sound

Laura-Jane (“LJ”) Rich reports that she experiences ‘flavor to sound (musical chords) synesthesia. For example, the taste of a doughnut produces a D major chord.164

“For me, tones […] have tastes, which makes for very interesting experiences when eating at restaurants. I find power ballads and Indian food together to be particularly pleasant, perhaps because there are soaring chords in both. Background music distracts me regularly; I’ll always have to identify the key and chord progressions, which sometimes means I’ll briefly tune out of conversations in order to do this. And if I don’t like the taste of something, it’s generally because I feel it’s ‘out of key with itself’. This leads to odd revelations about the difference between sensory experiences in food. For example, the taste of cooked onions tends towards major (around F# mostly) but the texture is always in a clashing key. I like the taste of onion on its own (as a flavouring), or an onion texture on its own, but not the combination.”

Flavor  touch

From Michael Watson, “the man who tasted shapes”165:

“Oh, dear […] there aren’t enough points on this chicken. […] I know it sounds crazy, but I have this thing, see, where I taste by shape. […] Flavors have shape, […] I wanted the taste of this chicken to be a pointed shape, but it came out all round. […] Well, I mean it’s nearly spherical, […] I can’t serve this if it doesn’t have points.”166

Hubbard, Brang and Ramachandran point out that areas in the brain involved with processing taste lie adjacent to areas which process touch; thus ‘flavor  color’ synesthesia might operate via aspects of proposed by the cross-activation (adjacency) theory.167

Odor  color

This is a less common type of synesthesia168. About 6.9% of all synesthetes have this type; this translates to a general population rate of roughly about 1 out of every 400 people. Raines writes of his subject, M.C.O., that, for her, “[o]dors

164 See Rich 2014. 165 See Cytowic 1993. 166 In Day, 2011, pp. 16 - 17. 167 See Hubbard et al. 2011. 168 See Russell et al. 2015. 93 too, have their appropriate psychochrome. Musk is always gold and brings with it the vision of dark faces, and the odor of carnations causes clouds of crimson to pass before the mind’s eye.”169

Figure 7.1 presents a depiction of one of my odor  color synesthetic perceptions.

Figure 7.1 – Depiction of what I synesthetically see when I smell fresh- mown grass

Regarding odor-induced synesthesiae, we should also consider the possibilities of synesthesiae induced via pheromones. There is increasing evidence that humans do indeed have pheromones170 which influence attention, focus, and other aspects of behavior. These include – but may not be limited to – andro-stadienone (androsta-4,16,-dien-3-one) and estratetraenol (estra-1,3,5(10),16-tetraen-3-ol).

Other types

Other documented types in this category, for which we have less information, include the following: flavor  temperature differences; odor  sound; odor  temperature differences; and odor  touch.

169 Raines 1909: 251. 170 See Zhou et al. 2014. 94

Chapter 8: From touch, pain, and related senses

Orgasm  colors

A somewhat rare type, occurring in perhaps about 2.1% of all synesthetes; this translates to a general population rate of roughly 1 out of every 1,300 people. However, this number is probably significantly off, as this is a topic for which there is obvious under-reporting in self-reporting forums, particularly, it appears, by males.

In 2002, a female Synesthesia List member wrote the following regarding this topic:

“[I]t is totally different each time, never the same pattern, colors or textures. Sometimes the colors, patterns/shapes/textures are explosive, as one would expect. Other times, they are liquid, or linear. Or maybe just one color spilling over the edge of something. Orgasms usually have a color associated with them, and they are always different. I can’t remember having the same colored orgasm. And the color usually (not always) has pattern, texture and movement.”

This does indeed sound like a type of synesthetic experience; however, the lack of consistency makes it seem more like adventitious or drug-induced synesthesia than like congenital synesthesia. Such is also the case for a different female Syn List member, who wrote in 2005, in reply to yet a third female synesthete who describe experiencing synesthetic visuals like “fireworks”, “I would describe it more like watching an abstract painting take form than fireworks – the colors kind of build up. The colors I see differ each time, although there are certain patterns that recur, and I sometimes find myself wondering what it is that makes me see certain familiar patterns of color at certain, apparently random, times.” A fourth female synesthete described her experiences by stating “[t]he colors are typically neon pastels, intertwined like rope or thick strands of licorice, exploding into ocean waves (cliché, I know, but it’s true!).” A fifth female synesthete described the experience a bit differently: “Orgasms, for me, tend to be a wave of fuchsia washing over me. Although, once or twice, it’s been blue (different sensation). And I can only suspect that it is the ‘afterimage’ sort of effect of fuchsia being sort of a sharp color, but I’m left with a soft mushy feeling, same as I get from eating bananas, cheese, peanut butter, potatoes, and graham crackers.” Also, from a sixth female synesthete: “I experience during orgasm what looks like an oil slick on the road after it’s rained. A myriad of various colors, ‘slicked’ or ‘blended’ together exactly as it looks on the road after rain, only it’s a bit more 3D.” Another female synesthete wrote, “I find I usually feel a cloud of color in the back of my throat, moving into my mouth and hovering there.” 95

Yet another female wrote, “I see a lot of colours when I orgasm. All kinds of colours. A maelstrom of bright and dark, they move in waves and flashes and seem to be centered in my chest and back of my head and also the obvious areas. It’s quite impressive. I managed to paint a 2D representation of it when I was younger, it didn’t quite do it justice though.” Yet a different female wrote the following: “Only if it is very intense. I get flashes color behind my eyelids. I’ve had red, green, white, and gold. I want to know why only those colors and what triggers them. I also want to experience other colors, if possible.” A male wrote, “Lots of colors like being in a paint ball room and it exploded.” A different male offered “[S]ometimes it is flashes of colors other times it is all I ‘see’ and moves like ... a wave. [It] depends on the situation.” As mentioned, quite noticeable with the aforementioned examples on this topic is that most are from females. Here is an excellent example of the misrepre- sentation of the sex ratio which may result in self-reporting. Searching through my files, I find very few males who report this type of synesthesia. That might be changing now, though, with the younger Facebook groups.

Orgasm  flavor

A female synesthete wrote that, for her, sex in general produces a flavor of pennies, and orgasms produce a flavor of “metallic water (like from a sink)”. Note that some epileptics report a metallic taste in their mouths as part of the “aura” prior to a seizure. I am not here wishing to imply that orgasm  flavor synesthesia is a type or symptom of epilepsy; I am only suggesting that there might be a similarity between the two.

Pain  colors

A Synesthesia List member wrote, “[h]eadaches appear as light blue arrows but I can make the pain disappear by forcefully taking the color away. I make the headache colours fade to white as in a movie, and the pain disappears along with them. It’s worked with all but perhaps 4 or 5 headaches in my lifetime.”

Touch  flavor

“There are several things I can’t eat if I’m holding them with my bare hands. Temperatures do nothing for me at all. It’s exclusive to texture, but there are people I avoid shaking hands with at office gatherings because of the way they taste. People who shave their arms fascinate me. They change flavours by the hour, and not always for the better. Foods also have different tastes depending on what they’re served in or what utensil they’re eaten with (don’t get me started about popsicle sticks – shudder).

“It’s nice to meet someone else who makes the distinction between ‘touch- taste’ and ‘mouth-taste’. My boyfriend tells me that I make different subtle hand gestures when I mean one or the other. Apparently, when I talk about the way something tastes by texture, I rub the tips of my fingers together.”

For some synesthetes, touch  flavor synesthesia can be exclusive to only sexually-related touching.

Other types

Other types of synesthesia in this group include the following: kinetics  color and kinetics  personification, both of which can include synesthetic perceptions associated with different tics caused by Tourette’s Syndrome; kinetics  sound; pain  flavor; pain  odor; pain  sound; temperatures  color; temperatures  sound; touch  color; touch  emotion171; touch  odor; touch  sound; and touch  temperature differences.

171 See Ramachandran and Brang 2008. 97

Chapter 9: From visual cues

But listen to the colour of your dreams. (from “Tomorrow never knows”, by John Lennon 1966)

“Auras”

A somewhat rare type of synesthesia involves what are commonly called “auras”. However, we need to clear some things up here right away. We’re not talking here about any type of “mystical”, religion-connected, or “spiritual” type images. Instead, we are talking about an odd phenomenon which we could instead label “facial perception to color” synesthesia. Human vision doesn’t work like a camera, taking in an image as a whole from the start and thus processing it as a whole from the start. Rather, vision takes in bits and pieces, of different types of aspects, and then puts them together, helped out by past experiences, memory, and a bit of guess-work172. So, when you are looking at someone’s face, you don’t start off with seeing the face as a whole; rather, you see, for example, the shape of the lips, the size of the eyes, the color of the hair, the style of the hair, the angle of the nose, and so on, all as separate, distinct components. These separate components are processed, and eventually information is sent to areas in your brain called fusiform gyri and inferior temporal gyri. One of the many functions performed in these areas, in the fusiform face area (FFA)173, is to see if you can put all of those geometric and color things together into a human face. There is also a separate cortical area, in the lateral occipitotemporal cortex, which processes visual perception of the rest of the body.174 However, as with other types of synesthesia, what happens if parts of these fusiform and/or inferior temporal gyri areas are not controlling their feedback signals correctly? That is, they don’t have the right level of disinhibition. And what if this results in signals “leaking” to parts of the brain which process color information – which are right next door to some of these areas anyway, and are doing feed-forward and feed-back of signals to these points anyway. Well then, what you could get would be that a certain facial configuration gets associated, through synesthesia processes, with a specific color. That is, the person is connected with a “color aura”. Now, what if, added to this, you have spatial projection of the synesthetic vision – as about 10% of all synesthetes who see colors for letters or numbers or music or flavors have. Then you’ll have a syn-

172 See Zeki 1993. 173 See Kanwisher et al. 1999. 174 Downing et al. 2001. 99 esthete who, when looking at someone’s face, has signals feeding into specific points in her brain at abnormal rates, resulting in her perceiving a projected field of a very specific color over or around the person-being-looked-at’s face. An “aura”. Now, I’m by no means suggestion that all accounts of auras are actually cases of synesthesia. No; most can easily be attributed to religious beliefs and mysticism. However, keep in mind that about one out of 25 people has some type of synesthesia, that roughly around one out of 50 has colored letters or numbers, and that roughly about one out of every 500 people spatially projects colors for numbers and letters. Spatially projecting colors for faces would work almost exactly the same way, although it would be significantly rarer. And, if we add to this that the changes in disinhibition needed between fusiform and/or inferior temporal gyri areas and color areas can also be brought about by drugs such as LSD or mescaline, we need to reconsider that some accounts out there of seeing colors around people’s faces might indeed be reports of actual perceptions – albeit synesthetic perceptions.

Hadjikhani et al.175 note the following:

“Face perception is an automatic, rapid and subconscious process, already present in human newborns, who preferentially orient towards simple schematic face-like patterns […]. The neural substrate for face processing consists of a distributed network of cortical and subcortical regions. The cortical areas include the inferior occipital gyrus, the fusiform gyrus, the superior temporal sulcus, and the inferior frontal gyrus, while the subcortical network comprises the superior colliculus, the pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus, and the amygdala […].”

Vision  flavor

Vision  flavor synesthesia is a fairly rare type; only about 2.7% of all synesthetes claim this type. Rather than covering the full range of different possible flavors, it can instead just cover “tastes”, thus manifesting itself as basically ‘color  taste‘ synesthesia. For example, one such synesthete claimed that, for her, “green is sweet; yellow and red are tangy. Clashing colours often give me a sour taste in my mouth. Also, colour combinations produce differing flavours. For example, if I see a rainbow of colours without green, it’s like a taste that isn’t quite sweet enough, and I feel like I have to add more green (sugar).” According to her relatives, Marilyn Monroe had this type of synesthesia.

175 Hadjikhani et al. 2009; see also de Heering and Rosion 2015. 100

Vision  sound

While it is possible to have ‘color  sound’ synesthesia, ‘vision  sound’ is most typically ‘visual motion  sound’.176

A university professor provided me with the following description of a synesthete student he encountered:

“She does not hear noises. It’s like musical notes, pitches. It’s not melodic nor harmonic, though. Anything moving inside her visual field (she does not need to be focusing it specially) provokes these pitches, which can be low or high. If she focuses her attention, however, it gets stronger. “She also says that it creates a lot of difficulties for her to concentrate in class – for example, when I walk through the classroom too much, she hears all kinds of pitches from my movements, and cannot understand as clear as it should be the things I’m talking about. “She’s asking if there are other syns […] similar to her, and how people deal with it. She finds the experience a bit disturbing – especially in [(name of city)], which is already a noisy city, filled up with all kinds of movements. She has lots of trouble concentrating.”

Mirror touch

Mirror-touch synesthesia is the situation where, upon seeing or imagining someone else being touched, the synesthete himself or herself also perceives a touch. Mirror-pain synesthesia would be the similar situation regarding seeing or imagining someone else in pain. Both of these types of synesthesia have been placed into a grouping labeled mirror-sensory synesthesia.177 An essential thing to note here is that the synesthete is not somehow “mystic- ally”, or via some type of “psi” or magical power, experiencing another’s pain as per science fiction and fantasy “empaths”. The synesthete is operating off of his or her own mental constructs of what another might be experiencing. The synesthete thus could be quite wrong in regards to whether someone else actually is experiencing pain or not. This can be best observed by noting that mirror-sensory synesthetes can experience perceptions of touch or pain from viewing actors on television, in films, or on stage, who are portraying being touched or being in pain without actually feeling such; note, for example, mirror-sensory synesthetes’ reactions to “slasher” horror movies, zombie movies, or staged, constructed scenes of pornography. With congenital mirror-touch synesthesia, it is more common for the perceived touch to be as if the person being looked at by the synesthete is like the synesthete looking into a mirror; that is, for example, a touch on what is the observed person’s right cheek will produce a synesthetic feeling of touch on the

176 See Saenz and Koch 2008; Hubbard 2008. 177 See Fitzgibbon et al. 2012; Bannisy et al. 2009. 101 left cheek.178 Interpreting the touch as being on the observed person’s right cheek, and then thus perceiving the touch on your own right cheek, is less common. Recent fMRI and voxel-based morphometry research179 suggests that posterior secondary somatosensory cortex plays a key role in mirror-touch synesthesia. For those with this type of synesthesia, an increase in gray matter was observed in this brain area. Hyper-activity in the secondary somatosensory cortex was observed in mirror-touch synesthetes who watched a person being touched, but there was hypo-activity in the same region when watching a dummy being touched.

Other types

Other documented types of synesthesia in this category, for which we however have less information, include the following: personality  flavor; personality  odor; vision  kinetics; vision  odor; vision  temperature differences; and vision  touch.

178 See Banissy and Ward 2013. 179 See Holle et al. 2013. 102

Chapter 10: Things affecting synesthesia (attrition and enhancement)

Can one lose congenital synesthesia?

At 1:47 a.m., on the morning of September 21st, 1999, Chichi, in Nantou, Taiwan, R.O.C., was hit with an earthquake which registered 7.3 on the Richter scale. At that time, my wife and I were living about 80 miles (about 130 kilo- meters) north-north-east, in Chungli. Our apartment was on the 17th floor – the top floor – of our building. As the building shook and cracks ran across our ceil- ings and down our walls, my wife and I, who had jumped out of bed, sat on the floor in our dining area, both petrified with fear. The earthquake, and the subsequent aftershocks, resulted in 2,416 deaths (including missing people), 11,443 severely wounded, and 44,338 houses completely destroyed. This earthquake, and the subsequent epidemics of cholera and hepatitis, left me with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. For about four months, I was completely without any of my synesthesiae. I was immediately aware of the loss, but was really unconcerned – I was simply too stressed out and had too many other things on my mind to care about my synesthesiae being gone. About two months after the earthquake, though, I did start missing my synesthesiae, albeit only now and then and just a little. I tried to produce some by listening to music; but I was still too stressed out, and music was still unenjoyable and provided no comfort. I also tried with foods, but all foods were bland and taste- less, producing no colors. I didn’t really start becoming concerned about whether my synesthesiae would return or not until about four months after the earthquake. But, within the same few days that I started to worry, my synesthesiae started to return. Very slowly, starting off very faintly and all washed out. It took yet another three or four months before my synesthesiae had returned to the full level they had prior to the earthquake. During those four months after the earthquake, I didn’t really become depressed or anguished about my loss of synesthesia, and, actually, really didn’t miss it much at all. It was of little concern. It was only once my synesthesia started coming back that I cared and realized how much I had missed my colored music, flavors and smells.

A subscriber to the Synesthesia List wrote the following:

“I had brain surgery 18 months ago (to remove a tumor) and was not much aware of any synesthetic experience in the two months of recovery. Synes- thetic experiences have been less noticeable as I continue to regain my strength. I’m not convinced that my synesthesia actually became weaker …. 103

It’s more that, since I had to relearn to balance, walk in a straight line, make sense of multiple sounds, and compensate in other ways for some lost functions (and, of course, work two jobs and attempt to carry on a normal life), the most pressing sensory issue has been to simply get up every day and function in a normal manner. Since my strongest synesthetic experiences are ‘touch  color’, ‘physical sensation  color’ and ‘emotion  color’, and all of these systems were hit hard by the tumor, the brain surgery, and the subsequent healing issues (brain chemistry imbalance, subsequent Rx, strange neuro events), it makes sense to me that synesthesia is not at the fore- front of my attention. I notice it now only in still moments with positive touch or feelings (during a massage, for instance), when I’m not taxing myself and I can focus on and attend to my experiences. I prefer to believe that, when recovery is no longer some-thing I think about regularly, I will notice that my synesthetic experiences have returned to their full frequency and intensity.”

Another subscriber to the Synesthesia List wrote the following: “I was raped when I was 7. Before that, my synesthesia was everywhere. Then it seemed like, as I repressed those memories, I also repressed some of my synesthesia. I still had music-color, but that was it (I had, before I was 7, color-taste and grapheme- color synesthesia; I have those now that I don’t have those memories repressed).” It is common for synesthesia researchers to occasionally bring up the topic of losing one’s synesthesia180. Oliver Sacks wrote of the loss of synesthesia due to injury, in the case of “Mr. I” (“the colorblind painter”) 181, who suffered a concussion in an automobile accident. Before the accident, Mr. I experienced visual synesthesia to music stimuli (colored musical notes); after the accident, the synesthesia was deadened. Mr. I suffered achromatopsia (inability to see colors) and temporary alexia (inability to read) as well. Unfortunately, the location of the brain damage in Mr. I remains unknown. Similar to this is the case reported by Spalding and Zangwill182 of a man whose number-form synesthesia was signify- cantly impaired due to a gunshot injury to his left-side occipito-parietal area. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation to the right posterior parietal lobe can temporarily attenuate ‘grapheme  color’ synesthesia183. However, keep in mind that certain types of synesthesiae come and go fairly frequently anyway – since synesthetes and non-synesthetes alike frequently lose one of their senses, or at least have it significantly diminished. I’m talking here about having a cold and losing one’s sense of smell and the ability to taste foods. Note, once again, that two of my own types of synesthesia are ‘flavor  color’ and ‘smell  color’. I get colds fairly frequently, almost always with severe nasal congestion, and am very use to the resulting significant reduction or total loss of two of my three types of synesthesia (actually, my ‘music  color’ synesthesia usually takes a hit during a cold, too, as my general “blah” feeling is reflected in my colors for

180 See, for example, Cytowic and Eagleman 2009; also Dittmar 2009. 181 Sacks 1995. 182 Spalding and Zangwill 1950. 183 Esterman et al. 2006. 104 music being all grayed out). Yet I know that the loss of my synesthesiae is caused by the nasal congestion, and, once that is gone, my synesthesiae will return. So, contrary to what other authors have written about loss of synesthesia, not all such situations are “traumatic” to the synesthete. Once again, we need to keep in consideration which specific types of synesthesiae, sensations and perceptions we are talking about, as well as the reason for the loss, the importance of the loss, and the consequences of the loss. Losing one’s ‘music  color’ synesthesia per- manently subsequent to a stroke is quite different than losing one’s ‘odor  color’ synesthesia yet once again for a week due to another cold.

What drugs effect congenital synesthesia, and how?

We do not have many laboratory, clinical test data regarding how various drugs influence synesthesia, as there are many ethical constraints against certain tests. Thus, most of the information on drug influences is anecdotal, and needs to be taken as such. Still, we have a fair amount of anecdotal data which are fairly consistent on some drugs, such as aspirin and alcohol; however, for others, such as hashish, there is very little known.

Acetaminophen

Acetaminophen (such as in Tylenol), also known as paracetamol, is an anal- gesic (pain reliever) and antipyretic (fever reducer). It tends to attenuate synesthesia.

Adderall

Adderall is amphetamine mixed salts. It is used to treat Attention-deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and narcolepsy. Adderall has been reported to alter synesthetic perceptions in some synesthetes. For example, with one ‘grapheme  color’ synesthete, while taking Adderall and under its effects, the letter ‘O’ is orange; when not taking Adderall, the letter ‘O’ is blue.

Alcohol

Alcohol has fairly predictable effects. Most synesthetes who drink report that a little bit of alcohol tends to enhance synesthetic perceptions. However, beyond a little bit, then there is a quick “crash” and alcohol reduces and deadens synesthesia.

105

Arecoline

While “betel” nut, or areca nut, the seed of the Areca catechu palm, is the fourth most commonly used psychoactive drug (after alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine), it is quite unfamiliar to many in North America and other areas of the world. One of the main ingredients, arecoline, has effects upon select nicotinic acetyl- choline receptor (nAChR) sub-types184. Arecoline is a hallucinogenic. Chewing betel nut also tends to increase production of and thicken the chewer’s saliva, also coloring the saliva a bright red; the excess saliva, in turn, induces a need to spit, and drooling. Like tobacco use, areca is also carcinogenic. One member of the Synesthesia List reported that use of betel nut heightened his synesthesia; “It was disorienting but not distressing.” Another Synesthesia List member reported that “a few nibbles” of betel nut had no effects upon her synesthesia.

Aripiprazole (Abilify)

Aripiprazole is a partial dopamine agonist, falling into the atypical class of antipsychotic drugs. It is used for treating schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder. A music  color synesthete reported to me that a doubling of her dosage of Abilify, from 7.5 mg to 15 mg, resulted in her losing her synesthesia. I do not yet know whether this loss was temporary or permanent.

Aspirin

Most synesthetes report that aspirin tends to attenuate synesthesia.

Benzodiazapines

Benzodiazapines are a group psychoactive drugs which include clordiazepoxide (Librium) and diazepam (Valium). They typically produce a sedative effect, and may be used for their anticonvulsant and muscle-relaxing properties. They are prescribed in the treatment of anxiety, insomnia, seizures, muscle spasms, and to alleviate withdrawal symptoms. A synesthete on Facebook reported that benzodiazapines greatly increased her synesthetic perceptions, particularly her touch  color synesthesia.

184 See Papke, Horenstein, and Stokes 2015. 106

Caffeine

Quite surprisingly, considering the world-wide rate of caffeine consumption, I have very little information regarding the effects of caffeine on synesthesia. What little I do have suggests that, most often, caffeine slightly dampens synesthesia. Too much caffeine (such as to cause jitters) may sometimes result in significant reduction of synesthesia.

Codeine

Codeine, such as in cold and flu medicines, has unpredictable effects. Some synesthetes report that it enhances synesthesia; for others, it deadens synesthetic perceptions. It can even go either way for the same one synesthete, on different occasions, as I myself have experienced.

Fluoxetine (Prozac)

Fluoxetine is an antidepressant, in the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) class. It is used for treatment of major depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and panic disorder, and may sometimes be prescribed to treat trichotillo- mania. According to Dr. David Brang and Dr. V.S. Ramachandran, fluoxetine (a.k.a., Prozac) inhibits synesthesia. As an SSRI, Prozac “increases serotonin and activates S1 receptors – hyperactivation of which is known to inhibit S2a receptors” which appear to be involved with some types of synesthesia. 185 Synes- thetes on Facebook and on the Synesthesia List have reported that fluoxetine increased their synesthetic perceptions. However, one subscriber to the Synesthe- sia List wrote “I have been taking Prozac for several years and don’t feel that it has had any effect on my synesthesia whatsoever; not that I was aware of my syn when I started taking it!”

Hashish

One of the subscribers to the Synesthesia List submitted the following:

“I’ve just remembered once when I went clubbing in London, I came back on the bus. I was really tired and my syn went ballistic. Everything I looked at smelt fantastic and it kept on changing all the time. I got home and my mate gave me some hash. I went even more mad and made my eyes water. That was strange because generally I find hash and stuff like that to be pretty grim. It’s much more exciting to drink tea, for some reason. That’s really sad, isn’t it!”

185 Brang and Ramachandran 2008: 903. 107

Lamotrigine

Lamotrigine is an anticonvulsant drug, used in the treatment of epilepsy, bipolar disorder, and clinical depression. I have encountered an unconfirmed case where a reduction in dosage of lamotrigine (that is, “easing off” of the drug) produced grapheme  color synesthesia in a person who already had other types of congenital synesthesia. Another synesthete reports, on the Synesthesia List, that lamotrigine had no effect on her visual synesthetic perceptions. However, a third reported that lamotrigine significantly distorted her visually/spatially perceived timeline. A fourth reported that an increase in dosage from 200 mg to 350 mg drastically increased her music  visual synesthesia, adding 3-dimensional spatial aspects that she can enter and have surround her.

Lithium

Synesthetes on Facebook have reported that lithium dulled their synesthesia.

LSD

Dr. David Brang and Dr. V.S. Ramachandran report that LSD produces synesthesia. “It selectively activates serotonin S2a receptors suggesting that S2a receptors are involved in synesthesia.”186 The few synesthetes who have corresponded with me about their use of LSD report that the drug had no direct influence on their synesthesia. However, virtually all of them reported really bad, unenjoyable, “bummer” trips on LSD, and that the general feeling of discomfort dulled or deadened synesthesia.

Marijuana

Regarding marijuana, the most common comment I get from synesthetes is that is has no effects on synesthesia whatsoever, whether we are talking light or heavy usage.

Melatonin

Brang and Ramachandran report of a case in which a subject “experienced grapheme – color synesthesia (various shades of bluish hue) for the first time in his life when he took 5 mg melatonin. He ‘passed’ the objective texture segrega- tion test suggesting that his experience of colors is genuine and sensory. The synesthesia could be turned off or on by withholding or administering melatonin. Serotonin is metabolized into melatonin in the brain which feeds back to inhibit

186 Brang and Ramachandran 2008: 903. 108 serotonin production. This reduces S1 activation and consequently dis-inhibits S2a receptors leading to synesthesia.”187 It should be noted, however, that this particular subject was a synesthete, having a couple other types, including a visual/spatial timeline.

Methylphenidate (Ritalin)

Methylphenidate is a psychostimulant drug, used for treatment of attention- deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, and narcolepsy. A member of the Synesthesia List reports that Strattera (the adult version of Ritalin) enhanced her visual synesthetic perceptions. How- ever, another subscriber noted that methylphenidate apparently has no effects upon kinetic  sound synesthesia.

Nicotine

Nicotine appears to have no effect on synesthesia.

Paroxetine (Paxil)

Paroxetine (Paxil) is an antidepressant drug of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) type. Paroxetine is used to treat major depression, obsess- sive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A member of the Synesthesia List reported that Paxil significantly atten- uated her synesthesia, “deadening” it and causing it to rarely occur.

Prednisone

A member of the Synesthesia List informed me that a high dosage of prednisone caused a temporary total loss of her sound/music-to-visual synesthesia. It took six months for her to regain her synesthesia.

Proguanil (anti-malarial drug)

A member of the Synesthesia List reported that Proguanil had no effects on her synesthesia.

187 Brang and Ramachandran 2008: 903; see also Brogaard 2013. 109

Propranolol

Propranolol is a sympatholytic nonselective beta blocker. It is used to treat high blood pressure, a number of heart dysrhythmias, those with thyrotoxicosis, and essential tremors. A member of the Synesthesia List wrote that propranolol had no effect on her synesthesia.

Sertraline hydrochloride (trade names Zoloft, Lustral)

Sertraline hydrochloride is an antidepressant of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) class. It is used in the treatment of major depressive disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and panic attacks. A member of the Synes- thesia List reported that Zoloft had no effect on her synesthesia. However, another wrote “I have ticker tape synesthesia and my doctor recently prescribed Zoloft to me. I took two doses of it and quit. Not only were the side effects terrible, but it slowed down and almost stopped my synesthesia. It didn’t change the words for me, it just stopped them.”

Sodium valproate

Sodium valproate is an anticonvulsant drug used in the treatment of epilepsy, anorexia nervosa, panic attacks, anxiety disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, migraines, bipolar disorder, and for other conditions as a mood stabilizer. It is reported, by a synesthete, via Facebook, that sodium valproate dulled her synesthetic perceptions to the point of their being almost gone. This same synesthete reported that SSRI’s had little effect upon her synesthesia.

Venlafaxine

Venlafaxine is an antidepressant of the serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor (SNRI) class. It is used in the treatment of major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder. A synesthete on Facebook reported that venlafaxine increased her synesthetic perceptions.

Vyvanse

Vyvanse (lisdexamfetamine), used as a treatment for ADD, has been reported by a synesthete (via Facebook) to have no effect upon her synaesthesia.

110

Wellbutrin

Buproprion, marketed under the name Wellbutrin, is an antidepressant. Brang and Ramachandran report that, in one case they observed, Wellbutrin “abolished synesthesia temporarily, presumably […] by inhibiting S2a receptors.”188

Hormones and other factors affecting synesthesia

Some female Synesthesia List members have reported that hormonal changes during menstrual cycles affect their synesthesia. The tendency seems to be for an increase in intensity of synesthetic perceptions during the time when one is ovulating or menstruating.

Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and synesthesia

In a discussion thread concerning schizophrenia, a member of the Synesthesia List wrote the following:

“I’m not schizophrenic but I am bipolar (used to be called Manic Depres- sion). I’ve often had problems with psychiatrists and therapists not knowing what synesthesia is and thinking that I’m talking about hallucinations – so now I make sure to ask if they’ve ever heard of synesthesia. If they haven’t heard of it and don’t seem to be open to new ideas, I just don’t tell them; it’s not worth the hassle. I’ll say I was asking because I have a friend that has it. Trying to convince a psychiatrist that you’re not hallucinating and that you don’t need to be hospitalized is a hard thing to do. “While it is true that many hallucinations have no basis in reality (‘Look at all the pretty bunnies! – Huh?!? No bunnies for miles.’), there are loads of hallucinations that are distortions of reality (The giant bird is going to eat me – the bird is only 5 inches long). In a psychotic state, I once saw a building break up into little pieces and fly away into outer space, but that does not change or negate the fact that I still see swirling colors and shapes when I listen to music. To me, it feels like the two things occur in two completely different parts of my brain. When I’m hallucinating, there’s usually a part of my brain that is freaking out and telling me that what is going on is ‘not right’; I do not have that when I’m having a syn experience. “Another thing to think about is […] the meds that schizophrenic and bipolar folks take. Antipsychotics, antidepressants and mood stabilizers can make it harder to connect with your synesthesia. Whereas my music-syn used to be bright swirling colors, it is now muted colors because of my head meds.”

188 Brang and Ramachandran 2008: 903. 111

112

Chapter 11: Some questions regarding synesthesia

Are synesthetes more creative?

One of the problems I have with the question of whether synesthetes are more “creative” than non-synesthetes is that this whole line of investigation is pre- mature: we do not yet have a sufficient definition of “creativity”, nor do we thus have adequate means to measure “creativity”. It would be easy for us to, say, measure output in paintings, sculpture, or other visual arts. We could also add musical arts, such as composition and performance. But what about the work of mathematicians or physicists? Is that “creative”? What about new dishes whip- ped up by a gourmet chef? Is that a display of creativity? What about reshaping a sword or an atlatl, or knapping a spearhead, so that it is more efficient for an individual user? It is easy to point to famous synesthete artists. They’re famous; they’re noticeable. However, if it is the case that synesthesia is genetic, and that about 3.7% of the world population has some type of synesthesia, then that means that, along with the synesthete musicians, painters, and physicists, we also have synesthete winos, prostitutes and junkies. Synesthetes are going to be found in all socio-economic classes, doing all kinds of different jobs. If synesthetes are indeed more creative, how will this be expressed – if ever – by the synesthete housewife, garbage man, or prison inmate? A study by Ward et al.189 provides some good insights into the question of whether synesthetes are “more artistic”. For those with certain types of synesthesia, the synesthete is slightly more likely than a non-synesthete to engage in artistic pursuits related either to the inducer or concurrent of one or more of the types of synesthesia he or she has. For example, someone with a ‘music-to-visual’ type of synesthesia might be more likely than a non-synesthete to take up a musical instrument, or to take up oil painting in an attempt to paint what he or she sees to music. Likewise, someone with a flavor-related synesthesia might be more likely than a non-synesthete to explore culinary arts. On the other hand, someone with a pain- or touch-related synesthesia does not appear to be more likely than a non- synesthete to engage in artistic expression. Yet here is the essential matter: synesthesia does not enhance artistic ability. Having a music-related synesthesia, for example, will not, in and of itself, make one a better musician; having colored graphemes will not make one a better poet. Talent comes from lessons, learning, experience, and practice. So, while we find that some types of synesthete are more likely to dabble in artistic pursuits, we find that the rate of professional artists, musicians, chefs, poets, and such who are synesthetes is not significantly higher than the rate amongst non-synesthetes.

189 Ward et al. 2008. 113

Synesthesia fascinates many people, particularly in regards to the potentials for new forms of artistic expression by integrating sensory modes. Thus there is a strong tendency to focus on the artists, musicians, authors, actors, and other such famous synesthetes. As suggested above, media attention does not generally instead direct itself to, for example, the synesthete elementary school teacher, auto mechanic, dentist, or accountant.

Can I learn to have synesthesia?

In 1934, E. Lowell Kelly attempted to teach colored hearing as a conditioned response190. The experiment failed quite dismally, leading Kelly to conclude that true colored-hearing synesthesia is a quite different thing than association, and that it may not be wholly produced via association. In 1944, T.H. Howells, attempted “The Experimental Development of Color-Tone Synesthesia”191 , in which he tried to teach colored hearing. As with Kelly’s experiment of ten years before, Howell’s experiment also met with little true success.

Does synesthesia improve memory?

Basically, no; at least not to any extraordinary amount. This has been seen with studies of grapheme  color synesthetes. Such synesthetes might use their synesthesia as mnemonic tools but it does not improve their memory abilities much – they still make mistakes at about the same rate as non-synesthetes.192

But aren’t people taught synesthetic paradigms as part of their culture?

Yes, they are. Or, more correctly, we commonly learn quite a lot of cross- modal associations, usually during early childhood. For example, in Mayan cosmology, the cardinal direction east is red, north is white, west is black, and south is yellow; the central point, where the “world tree” (Wacah Chan) exists, is blue-green.193 Or, among the Tukano Indians of the Amazon, the local earth, where one lives, is associated with the color red; the underground, where souls go to cool, verdant, peaceful comfort after death, is green; the sun is yellow; between the earth and the sun, connecting the two, is the realm of the Milky Way, which is blue; and the lands beyond and surrounding

190 Kelly 1934. 191 Howells 1944. 192 See Rothen & Meiers 2010; Yaro & Ward 2007. 193 Schele and Freidel 1990. 114 one’s own home area, where ghosts, enemies and monsters dwell, are black, the color of fright and fear (thus “heaven” is below us and “hell” surrounds us).194 Yet, we can instead look to something more common and basic to most of us: the artificial coloring added to candies such as Life Savers or jelly beans. In North America and Western Europe (at least; this probably extends much further throughout the world), if I were to give you a red jelly bean, it would be most likely assumed that its flavor is cherry; we are culturally taught, at a young age, to associate the color red with the flavor of cherry, at least in regards to candies, sodas, and other sweets. Less common, but another likely alternative would be red = cinnamon. Likewise, green = lime, light green = mint, purple = grape; black = licorice, brown = root beer. Now, how about a blue jelly bean or soda? In North America, blue would most likely be connected with the flavor of raspberry (or berries in general), as was the case with Pepsi Blue. However, in other places in the world, such as in Taiwan and Indonesia, blue (rather than pink) might be more likely to be associated with the flavor of bubblegum. Or, instead, purple might be connected to taro, rather than grape. Meanwhile, apples might be associated with the color green, rather than red.

Do cats or dogs have synesthesia?

I first encountered this question over ten years ago, and it has become one of my favorites. Every once in a while, I am asked this question, usually by an eager elementary or junior high school student. Okay, to start this, “synesthesia” means a “merging of the senses”. Which implies that there first has to be an alternate, “normal”, un-merged state of the senses. So, once again, synesthesia is the anomalous condition; the statistically less-common condition. So, if we are going to consider a cat, we need to first look at what a cat’s sensoria is normally like. Now, if we consider that human babies start off as mon- esthetes195 but then, normally, the senses divide into what we consider to be the common “separate” senses, then, turning to the cat, we need to look at the extent to which a newborn kitten is a monesthete, and the extent to which sensory modes normally separate as the cat matures. Apparently, cats do indeed start out with connections between auditory and visual areas, which are subsequently pruned as the kitten matures196. For humans, congenital synesthesia emerges when senses do not totally separate as per what is statistically “normal”, or when something does not regulate the amount of feedback such that it flows at the “most common” rate. Likewise, in order for a cat (or dog, or other allo-animal) to be a “synesthete”, there would have to be an aberration in the individual cat from what is the average, typical set- up. Note, for example, that macaques apparently have connections between pri-

194 See Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971. 195 See Maurer 1997. 196 See also Dehay et al. 1988; Innocenti et al. 1988. 115 mary auditory cortex and its V1 visual area – somewhat different than what is found in humans – throughout their lives197. So, first we need to know what the average, typical set-up is for a cat. Then we would need to develop tests to see if any cats have an atypical set-up that results in sensory perceptions not “normal” to a cat. It quickly becomes apparent that, if any cat was a synesthete, its synesthetic experiences would be somewhat different than that of humans. I speculate that cats, dogs, and other animals might encounter adventitious synesthesia due to strokes, seizures, or other brain injuries. However, I think it might be far less likely that they have genes working in a similar way as human genes towards the occasional production of congenital synesthesia.

Synesthesia and problems with sleep

A subscriber to the Synesthesia List wrote the following:

“I was just wondering if anyone else had problems sleeping due to syn. I hardly sleep at all. For example, the weird lighting in the dark tastes funny, small noises taste weird, even the complete silence (white noise?) makes me itch. Music or TV to fall asleep is just out of the question. People’s voices are another story. It is just distracting and I have no idea what to do! It is very hard for me to concentrate, always has been, and I just wanted to know if this happened to anyone else, and how you deal with it. This is the only drawback I’ve ever found with synesthesia, and going to my doctor and asking for something to put me to sleep has only brought on the topic of being a lab rat.”

Synesthetes, ghosts, and angels

A fellow synesthete from England recently asked me, “What’s been your most unusual experience as a synesthete?” As to experiences, there have been so many, over the years, it’s extremely difficult to pick just one! We have the various priests, rabbis, self-proclaimed “shamans” and other religious officials or acolytes who have asked me to – or insisted that I must – use my synesthesia to help locate ghosts. In the past twenty years, I’ve been asked more than a couple of times to be part of a team to investigate a haunted house. I’ve also been asked to be a con- sultant for developing new ghost-detecting technologies. And then, … yes, I’ve been asked to assist in an exorcism more than once. But, no, I’ve politely – well, admittedly, once or twice not so politely – turned down all such requests. I guess, though, that, if I was seeking the weirdest one of all – one that still rattles me years later – it would be the time, around the year 2002, I was contacted by representatives of what was formerly the Stargate Project198, a US Army

197 See Falchier et al., 2002. 198 See Ronson 2009. 116 research operation, which had been officially “terminated” in 1995; it was now a private research firm consulting for the military. They either worked with or had previously worked with Major Albert Stubblebine. Apparently, I caught the attention of Edwin C. May, who had been a member of the team. I, at first, was wary of their credentials, skeptical that the former sub-department mentioned existed, and figured the whole thing to be a hoax. However, they were quick with being able to indeed show me that all was legit; this actually was real! Their organization wasn’t “secret”, per se, but some of their research projects were, and they wished the particular matter they wanted to recruit me for to be “Top Secret”, with my signed consent to documents such that I would face severe penalties if I then revealed military research and thus threatened national security. (Incidentally, this took place during the George W. Bush administra- tion.) This group wanted to contract me to do my civic duty for the U.S. by finding and recruiting synesthetes to locate and interact with angels. The organization had not yet concluded that synesthetes indeed had such capabilities, but had concluded that such most certainly must be the case, and that it was dire that this be put to test. The critical focus, and ultimate goal, was to be able to interact directly with one or more archangels – the archangel Gabriel was a prime focus – such that the U.S. could then more directly and assuredly solicit their aid in forming armies of angels for our national defense. I turned down the request. And then did so again a couple more times, after repeated, somewhat pressured, inquiries. Finally, the representatives said that they “respected” my decision not to assist. And assured me that their department would be keeping a careful eye on future synesthesia research and synesthete activities. In 2013, I was again contacted by Edwin C. May and his colleague Sonali Bhatt Marwaha. They now wanted my assistance with a project towards confirm- ing that synesthesia was a “doorway” superpower towards the development of “remote viewing” and related “psi powers”.199 I responded by dismissing such proposals.

Is synesthesia a sign of evolutionary advancement?

I, myself a synesthete, have major problems with those who suggest that synesthesia might be “the next step in evolution”, or that synesthetes are somehow biologically or evolutionarily “superior”. Biological evolution isn’t teleological. There’s no goal. There are far too many variables, on all levels, from the genetic level with mutations and jumps, to the global environmental level. We don’t know where we’re going, so we have no way of telling what the best adaptations will be, as what is good and beneficial for this particular place and time might prove detrimental on down the road as things change; or, albeit to a lesser extent, vice versa.

199 See Marwala and May 2015. 117

Since biological evolution isn’t teleological, all we can do is look at where we’ve been, and note how we lucked out in that past adaptations allowed at least a small handful of us to produce a next generation of viable offspring (that is, able to themselves reproduce). If we look into our past, we’ll see that there were more than a couple of times when we almost didn’t make it, and just avoided going extinct; the Permian-Triassic (P-Tr) and Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary global mass extinctions come immediately to mind. From what we know of synesthesia so far, on the genetic and anatomical levels, it’s a predictable variance of our current general genetic build. It’s not the most common manifestation seen in humans, but it’s not outside of what are normal parameters. For comparison, we could look at people with red hair or green eyes. On a world-wide scale, currently, it’s most common for humans to have black hair and brown eyes. However, our current genetic makeup is such as to allow for some humans to have red hair and/or green eyes. Red hair and green eyes aren’t “average” or “typical”; but they’re predictable considering what we now know about our current genetic makeup and the parameters involved. They’re not an “aberration”; green hair and glowing red eyes would, currently, be an aberration. Likewise, synesthesia, while not average or typical, is predictable and not outside of the parameters. Or we could look at people with Down syndrome or Triple X syndrome. Our chromosomal makeup and aspects of meiosis make it quite predictable that, sometimes, a person might be born with an extra 21st or X chromosome. So, is having red hair or green eyes “the next step in human evolution”? Or an “advancement”? Or is it only a trivial variance, only made important by culture. Down syndrome and Triple X Syndrome aren’t “trivial”; however, as variances, why don’t we consider one or both of these the “next step”? It’s interesting, and, to me, rather disturbing, that someone would focus on synesthesia, deeming it a current “positive” attribute, as an “advancement”. It calls to mind how certain cultures have previously viewed – or still do view – epileptics (and here I’m reminded of Dostoyevsky’s The idiot, and Anne Fadiman’s descriptions of Hmong beliefs in The spirit catches you and you fall down), or schizophrenics, autists, and those with Parkinson’s Disease or Down syndrome as either “sainted” or “possessed”. So, if we’re looking for “advancement” in regards to a species, it won’t be obtained by any one particular genetic/physiological manifestation. Rather, it’ll be through the emergence of broad and expanding diversity within the species, such that, as situations around it change, at least some variants will survive to make it into and through the next age. This, for example, is one reason why so many previous and current species went or are going extinct, such as with the lack of diversity in the diet of pandas. Thus, the “advancement” is not the synesthete. Rather, the advancement is that we now have both the synesthete and the non-synesthete. It’s not the synesthete that we should look to and applaud but rather both the synesthete and non- synesthete and their differences and diversity – for it’s the fact that we have both groups that gives our species a better fighting chance to still be here tomorrow. As a synesthete, I could easily and readily celebrate synesthesia. I’d rather celebrate diversity.

118

119

120

Resources:

On-line tests for synesthesia:

The Synesthesia Battery: http://synesthete.org/

Organizations:

The American Synesthesia Association (North America): http://www.synesthesia.info/index.html

Deutsche Synästhesie-Gesellschaft e.V. (Germany): http://www.synaesthesie.org/1news/Aktuelles

Российского синестетического сообщества (Russia): http://www.synaesthesia.ru/

Arte Città (Spain): http://www.artecitta.es/

Sinestesia/Synesthesia – Grupo de investigación Internacional (Spain): http://sites.google.com/site/sinestesiagroupint/Home

The UK Synaesthesia Association: http://www.uksynaesthesia.com/

Websites providing forums and information:

Sinestesia – Italia [Italiano]: http://sinestesia.weebly.com/ 121

Synästhesiewerkstatt, by Christine Söffing [Deutsch]: http://www.synaesthesiewerkstatt.de/

Synesthesia, by Crétien van Campen [English & Nederlands]: http://synesthesie.nl/ the Synesthesia List [English; forum is multi-lingual]: http://www.daysyn.com/Synesthesia-List.html

Facebook groups:

Facebook groups are very transitory. However, at time of writing, there are the following: The International Association of Synaesthetes, Artists, and Scientists. Major English language groups include “I have Synesthesia: I’m not a freak, I’m a Synesthete”, and “Synaesthesia research”; the UK Synaesthesia Association also has a Facebook page. In Finnish, there is “Synestesiayhdistys - Synestesia Finland”. In German, there is the “Deutsche Synästhesie-Gesellschaft e.V.” (the German Synaesthesia Association). In Italian, there is the group “Sinestesia e sinesteti - gruppo italiano”. In Russian, there is “Синестезия” (“Synaesthesia.ru”).

122

Bibliography

Amin, Maina, Olufemi Olu-Lafe, Loes E. Claessen, Monika Sobczak-Edmans, Jamie Ward, Adrian L. Williams, and Noam Sagiv. 2011. “Understanding grapheme personification: A social synaesthesia?” Journal of Neuropsychology; vol. 5: 255 – 282.

Asher, Julian E., Janine A. Lamb, Denise Brocklebank, Jean-Baptiste Cazier, Elena Maestrini, Laura Addis, Mallika Sen, Simon Baron-Cohen, and Anthony P. Monaco. 2009. “A whole-genome scan and fine-mapping linkage study of auditory-visual synesthesia reveals evidence of linkage to chromosomes 2q24, 5q33, 6p12, and 12p12.” American Journal of Human Genetics; vol. 84; 13 Feb.: 279 – 285.

Astie, David. 2007. “Geoffrey Rush: A man for all seasons.” Sun Herald; May 20. http://www.grippers.com.au/grippers-articles/2007/5/20/geoffrey-rush- a-man-for-all-seasons/

Aveni, Anthony. 2002. Empires of time: calendars, clocks, and cultures. Revised edition. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado.

Banissy, Michael J., Roi Cohen Kadosh, Gerrit W. Maus, Vincent Walsh, and Jamie Ward. 2009. “Prevalence, characteristics and a neurological model of mirror-touch synaesthesia.” Experimental Brain Research; vol. 198: 261 - 272.

Banissy, Michael J., and Jamie Ward. 2013. “Mechanisms of self-other representations and vicarious experiences of touch in mirror-touch synesthesia.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience; April 30; vol. 7, art. 112; doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00112.

Barber, Lynn. 2000. “Rik Mayall: Forever young.” The Observer; Saturday, 16 December. http://www.theguardian.com/film/2000/dec/17/features.magazine

Barney, Anna, Sandra Martelli, Antoine Serrurier, and James Steele. 2012. “Articulatory capacity of Neandertals, a very recent and human-like fossil hominin.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B; vol. 367: 88 – 102.

123

Baron-Cohen, Simon. 1996. “Is there a normal phase of synaesthesia in development?” http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-27- baron_cohen.html

Baron-Cohen, Simon, Maria A. Wyke, and Colin Binnie. 1987. “Hearing words and seeing colours: An experimental investigation of a case of synaesthesia.” Perception; vol. 16: 761 – 767.

Beauchamp, Michael S., and Tony Ro. 2008. “Neural substrates of sound-touch synesthesia after a thalamic lesion.” Journal of Neuroscience; vol. 28(50); 10 December: 13696 – 13702.

Beeli, Gian, Michaela Esslen, and Lutz Jäncke. 2005. “When coloured sounds taste sweet.” Nature; vol. 434; 3 March: 38.

Berlin, Brent, and Paul Kay. 1969. Basic color terms: Their universality and evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Boë, Louis-Jean, Jean-Louis Heim, Kiyoshi Honda, and Shinji Maeda. 2002. “The potential Neandertal vowel space was as large as that of modern humans.” Journal of Phonetics; July; vol. 30(3): 465 – 484.

Bosley, Hannah G., and David M. Eagleman. 2015. “Synesthesia in twins: Incomplete concordance in monozygotes suggests extragenic factors.” Behavioural Brain Research; vol. 286: 93 – 96.

Brang, David, and Vilayanur S. Ramachandran. 2008. “Psychopharmacology of synesthesia; the role of serotonin S2a receptor activation.” Medical Hypotheses; vol. 70(4): 903 – 904.

Brogaard, Berit. 2013. “Serotonergic hyperactivity as a potential factor in developmental, acquired and drug-induced synesthesia.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience; October; vol. 7, article 657.

Brogaard, Berit, Simo Vanni, and Juha Silvanto. 2012. “Seeing mathematics: Perceptual experience and brain activity in acquired synesthesia.” Neurocase; http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13554794.2012.701646

Bronchti, Gilles, Peter Heil, Ronen Sadka, Andreas Hess, Henning Scheich, and Zvi Wollberg. 2002. “Auditory activation of ‘visual’ cortical areas in the blind mole rat (Spalax ehrenbergi).” European Journal of Neuroscience; vol. 16: 311 – 329.

Brown, Jeanell Wise. 1994. Amy Beach and her chamber music: biography, documents, style. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press.

124

Brugger, Peter, Daria Knoch, Christine Mohr, and Lorena R.R. Gianotti. 2004. “Is digit-color synaesthesia strictly unidirectional? Preliminary evidence for an implicitly colored number space in three synaesthetes.” Acta Neuropsychologica; vol. 2(3): 252 – 258.

Calkins, Mary Whiton. 1893. “A statistical study of pseudo-chromesthesia and of mental-forms.” American Journal of Psychology; vol. 5: 439 – 464.

Caramazza, Alfonso, and Gabrielle Miceli. 1990. “The structure of graphemic representations.” Cognition; vol. 37: 243 – 297.

Coe, Michael D. 2012. Breaking the Maya code. Third edition. New York: Thames and Hudson.

Cohen, Michael X., Kathrin Weidacker, Judith Tankink, H. Steven Scholte, and Romke Rouw. 2015. “Grapheme-color synesthesia subtypes: Stable individual differences reflected in posterior alphaband oscillations.” Cognitive Neuroscience; http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17588928.2015.1017450

Cohen-Kadosh, Roi, Noam Sagiv, David E.J. Linden, Lynn C. Robertson, Gali Elinger, and Avishai Henik. 2005. “When blue is larger than red: colors influence numerical cognition in synesthesia”. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience; 17(11): 1766 – 1773.

Collins, Mary. 1929. “A case of synaesthesia.” Journal of General Psychology; vol. 2: 12 – 27.

Cotelli, Maria, Jubin Abutalebi, Marco Zorzi, and Stefano F. Cappa. 2003. “Vowels in the buffer: a case study of acquired dysgraphia with selective vowel substitutions.” Cognitive Neuropsychology; vol. 20(2): 99 – 114.

Cross, Charles. 2006. Room full of mirrors: A biography of Jimi Hendrix. New York: Hachette Books

Cubelli, Roberto. 1991. “A selective deficit for writing vowels in acquired dysgraphia.” Nature; vol. 353; 19 Sept.: 258 – 260.

Cytowic, Richard E. 1993. The man who tasted shapes. New York: Putnam.

Cytowic, Richard E. 1989. Synesthesia: a union of the senses. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Cytowic, Richard E. 2002. Synesthesia: a union of the senses. Second edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

125

Cytowic, Richard E., and David M. Eagleman. 2009. Wednesday is indigo blue. Cambridge and London: MIT Press.

D’Anastasio, Ruggero, Stephen Wroe, Claudio Tuniz, Lucia Mancini, Deneb T. Cesana, Diego Dreossi, Mayoorendra Ravichandiran, Marie Attard, William C. H. Parr, Anne Agur, Luigi Capasso. 2013. “Micro- biomechanics of the Kebara 2 Hyoid and its implications for speech in Neandertals. PLOS ONE; December; vol. 8(12): e82261.

Dann, Kevin T. 1998. Bright Colors Falsely Seen: Synaesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Day, Sean A. 2011. “The human sensoria and a synaesthetic approach to cooking.” With contributions courtesy of James Wannerton. Collapse; VII: 378 – 409.

Day, Sean A. 2005. “Chapter 2: Some demographic and socio-cultural aspects of synesthesia.” In Robertson & Sagiv, eds.; Synesthesia: perspectives from cognitive neuroscience; Oxford: University Press. Pp. 11 – 33. de Heering, Adélaïde, and Bruno Rossion. 2015. “Rapid categorization of natural face images in the infant right hemisphere.” eLife; DOI: 10.7554/eLife.06564.

Dediu, Dan, and Stephen C. Levinson. 2013. “On the antiquity of language: the reinterpretation of Neandertal linguistic capacities and its consequences.” Frontiers in Psychology; July; vol. 4: Article397.

Dehay, Collette, Henry Kennedy, and Jean Bullier. 1988. “Characterization of transient cortical projections from auditory, somatosensory, and motor cortices to visual areas 17, 18, and 19 in the kitten.” Journal of Comparative Neurology; vol. 272: 68 – 89.

Dittmar, Alexandra, ed. 2009. Synaesthesia: a “golden thread” through life? Translation of Synästhesien: Roter Faden durchs Leben? Essen: Die Blaue Eule.

Dixon, Mike J., Daniel Smilek, Patricia L. Duffy, Mark P. Zanna and Philip M. Merikle. 2006. “The role of meaning in grapheme-colour synaesthesia.” Cortex; vol. 42: 243 – 252.

Dixon, Mike J., Daniel Smilek, and Philip Merikle. 2004. “Not all synaesthetes are created equal: Projector versus associator synaesthetes.” Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience; 4(3): 335 – 343.

126

Dovern, Anna, Gereon R. Fink, A. Christina B. Fromme, Afra M. Wohlschläger, and Valentin Riedl. 2012. “Intrinsic network connectivity reflects consistency of synesthetic experiences.” Journal of Neuroscience; May 30; 32(22): 7614 – 7621.

Downey, June E. 1911. “A case of colored gustation.” American Journal of Psychology; vol. 22: 528 – 539.

Downing, Paul E., Yuhong Jiang, Miles Shuman, and Nancy Kanwisher. 2001. “A cortical area selective for visual processing of the human body.” Science; vol. 293; 28 Sept.: 2470 – 2473.

Ekman, Karl. 1938. Jean Sibelius: His life and personality. Translated from the Finnish by Edward Birse. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Esterman, Michael, Timothy Verstynen, Richard B. Ivry, and Lynn C. Robertson. 2006. “Coming unbound: disrupting automatic integration of synesthetic color and graphemes by transcranial magnetic stimulation of the right parietal lobe.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience; vol. 18(9): 1570 – 1576.

Falchier, Arnaud, Simon Clavagnier, Pascal Barone, and Henry Kennedy. 2002. “Anatomical evidence of multimodal integration in primate striate cortex.” Journal of Neuroscience; vol. 22(13): 5749 – 5759.

Ferrari, G.C. 1910. “Una nuovo caso di sinestesia uditivo-gustativa.” Rivista di Psicologia Applicata; vol. 6: 101 – 104.

Ferrari, G.C. 1907. “Una varieta nuova di sinestesia.” Rivista di Psicologia; vol. 3: 297 – 317.

Feynman, Richard. 1988. What do you care what other people think? New York: Norton.

Fitch, W. T. 2009. “Fossil cues to the evolution of speech,” In R. Bothaand and C. Knight, eds; The cradle of language; Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. 112 – 134.

Fitzgibbon, Bernadette M., Peter G. Enticott, Anina N. Rich, Melita J. Giummarra, Nellie Georgiou-Karistianis, and John L. Bradshaw. 2012. “Mirror-sensory synaesthesia: Exploring ‘shared’ sensory experiences as synaesthesia.” Neuroscience and Behavioral Reviews; Jan.; vol. 36(1): 645 – 657.

Flournoy, T. 1893. Des phenomenes de synopsie. Paris: Felix Alcan.

127

Fornazzari, Luis, Corinne E. Fischer, Lee Ringer, and Tom A. Schweizer. 2012. “’Blue is music to my ears’: Multimodal synesthesias after a thalamic stroke.” Neurocase; vol. 18(4): 318 – 322.

Galeyev, Bulat M. 1987. Man – Art – Technology: The Problem of Synesthesia in Art. Kazan, Russia: Kazan University Press. (In Russian.)

Galeyev, Bulat M., and Irena L. Vanechkina. 2001. “Was Scriabin a synaesthete?” Leonardo; vol. 34(4): 34(4): 357 – 361.

Galton, Francis. 1883. Inquiries into human faculty and its development. New York: E.P. Dutton.

Galton, Francis. 1881. “The visions of sane persons.” Fortnightly Review; vol. 29: 729 – 740.

Galton, Francis. 1880. "Visualised numerals." Journal of the Anthropological Institute; vol. 10: 85 - 102.

Gebuis, Titia, Tanja C. W. Nijboer, and Maarten J. Van der Smagt. 2009. “Multiple dimensions in bi-directional synesthesia.” European Journal of Neuroscience; vol. 29: 1703 – 1710.

George, Don. 1981. Sweet man: The real Duke Ellington. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

Gray, Jeffrey A., Susan Chopping, J. Nunn, David M. Parslow, Lloyd Gregory, Steven C. R. Williams, Michael J. Brammer, and Simon Baron-Cohen. 2002. “Implications of synaesthesia for functionalism.” Journal of Consciousness Studies; 9: 5 – 31.

Grossenbacher, Peter G., and Christopher T. Lovelace. 2001. “Mechanisms of synesthesia: cognitive and physiological constraints.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences; vol. 5:1: 36 – 41.

Hadjikhani, Nouchine, Kestutis Kveraga, Paulami Naik, and Seppo P. Ahlfors. 2009. “Early (N170) activation of face-specific cortex by face-like objects.” Neuroreport; March 4; vol. 20(4): 403 – 407.

Hancock, Peter. 2006. “Monozygotic twins’ colour-number association: a case study.” Cortex; vol. 42: 147 – 150.

Hänggi, Jürgen, Gian Beeli, Mathias S. Oechslin, and Lutz Jäncke. 2008. “The multiple synaesthete E.S. – Neuroanatomical basis of interval-taste and tone-color synaesthesia.” NeuroImage; vol. 43: 192 – 203.

128

Hänggi, Jürgen, Diana Wotruba, and Lutz Jäncke. 2011. “Globally altered structural brain network topology in grapheme-color synesthesia.” Journal of Neuroscience; April; vol. 31(15): 5816 – 5828.

Henkin, R.I., and G.F. Powell. 1962. “Increased sensitivity of taste and smell in cystic fibrosis.” Science; vol. 138; 7 Dec.: 1107 – 1108.

Holcombe, Alex O., Eric L. Altschuler, and Harriet J. Over. 2009. “A developmental theory of synesthesia with long historical roots: a comment on Hochel and Milan.” Cognitive Neuropsychology; vol. 26: 227 – 229.

Holle, Henning, Michael J. Banissy, and Jamie Ward. 2013. “Functional and structural brain differences associated with mirror-touch synaesthesia.” NeuroImage; vol. 83: 1041 – 1050.

Howells, T.H. 1944. “The experimental development of color-tone synesthesia.” Journal of Experimental Psychology; vol. 34: 87 – 103.

Howes, David, Editor. 1991. The varieties of sensory experience: a sourcebook in the anthropology of the senses. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press.

Hubbard, Edward M. 2008. “Synaesthesia: the sound of moving patterns.” Current Biology; vol. 18(15): R657 – R659.

Hubbard, Edward M., A. Cyrus Arman, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, and Geoffrey M. Boynton. 2005a. “Individual differences among grapheme- color synesthetes: brain-behavior correlations.” Neuron; vol. 45; March: 975 – 985.

Hubbard, Edward M., David Brang, and Vilayanur S. Ramachandran. 2011. “The cross-activation theory at 10.” Journal of Neuropsychology; vol. 5: 152 – 177.

Hubbard, Edward M., and Vilayanur S. Ramachandran. 2003. “Refining the experimental lever: a reply to Shanon and Pribram.” Journal of Consciousness Studies; vol. 10(3): 77 – 84.

Hung, Wan-Yu. 2013. “Synesthesia in non-alphabetic languages.” In J. Simner & E. Hubbard, eds.; The Oxford handbook of synesthesia; Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. 205 – 221.

Hupé, Jean-Michel, Cécile Bordier, and Michel Dojat. 2011. “The neural bases of grapheme-color synesthesia are not localized in real color-sensitive areas.” Cerebral Cortex; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhr236.

129

Innocenti, Giorgio M., Pere Berbel, and Stephanie Clarke. 1988. “Development of projections from auditory to visual areas in the cat.” Journal of Comparative Neurology; vol. 272: 242 – 259.

Jacobs, Lawrence, Alice Karpik, Diana Bozian, and Svend Gøthgen. 1981. “Auditory-visual synesthesia: sound-induced photisms.” Archive of Neurology; vol. 38, April: 211 – 216.

James, William. 1890. The principles of psychology. In C. Green, ed.; [An internet resource developed by Christopher D. Green]; Toronto, Ontario: York University. http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/index.htm jayohenjee. 2010. Lady GaGa’s interview in Singapore. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOynq06e_CQ&feature=results_main &playnext=1&list=PL780B4CB0F5884F7A

Jenkins, Walter S. 1994. The remarkable Mrs. Beach, American composer. Warren, MI: Harmonie Park Press.

Jewanski, Jörg. 1999. Ist C = Rot?: Eine Kultur- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte zum Problem der wechselseitigen Bezeihung zwischen Ton und Farbe. Von Aristoteles bis Goethe. Berliner Musik Studien, Band 17. Sinzig: Studio.

Jewanski, Jörg, Sean A. Day, and Jamie Ward. 2009. “A colorful albino: the first case of synaesthesia, by Georg Tobias Ludwig Sachs in 1812.” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences; 18: 293 – 303.

Jones, C.L., M.A. Gray, L. Minati, Julia Simner, H.D. Critchley, and Jamie Ward. 2011. “The neural basis of illusory gustatory sensations: two rare cases of lexical-gustatory synaesthesia.” Journal of Neuropsychology; vol. 5: 243 – 254.

Joseph, George Gheverghese. 2011. The crest of the peacock: non-European roots of mathematics. Third edition. Princeton: University Press.

Kanwisher, Nancy, Damian Stanley, and Alison Harris. 1999. “The fusiform face area is selective for faces not animals.” Neuroreport; vol. 10(1); 18 Jan.: 183 – 187.

Kay, Paul. 1975. “Synchronic variability and diachronic change in basic color terms.” Language in Society; vol. 4: 257 – 270.

Kay, Paul, and Chad K. McDaniel. 1978. “The linguistic significance of the meanings of basic color terms.” Language; Sept.; vol. 54(3): 610 – 646.

130

Kay, Paul, and Terry Regiel. 2003. “Resolving the question of color naming universals.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; vol. 100(15); 22 July: 9085 – 9089.

Kelly, E. Lowell. 1934. “An experimental attempt to produce artificial chromaesthesia by the technique of the conditioned response.” Journal of Experimental Psychology; vol. 17: 315 – 341.

Krause, Johannes, Carles Lalueza-Fox, Ludovic Orlando, Wolfgang Enard, Richard E. Green, Hernán A. Burbano, Jean-Jacques Hublin, Catherine Hänni, Javier Fortea, Marco de la Rasilla, Jaume Bertranpetit, Antonio Rosas, and Svante Pääbo. 2007. “The derived FOXP2 variant of modern humans was shared with Neandertals.” Current Biology; November 6, vol. 17: 1908 – 1912.

Lewis, Walter H., and Memory P.F. Elvin-Lewis. 1977. Medical Botany: plants affecting man’s health. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Liem, Djin Gie, and Julie A. Mennella. 2003. “Heightened sour preferences during childhood.” Chemical Senses; vol. 28: 173 – 180.

Ligeti, György. 1983 (1981). Ligeti in conversation. London: Eulenburg Books.

Lindemann, Bernd. 2001. “Receptors and transduction in taste.” Nature; vol. 413; 13 Sept.: 219 – 225.

Luke, David P., and Devin B. Terhune. 2013. “The induction of synaesthesia with chemical agents: a systematic review.” Frontiers in Psychology; vol. 4; 17 Oct.: doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00753

Mahling, Friedrich. 1926. “Das Problem der ‘Audition colorée: Eine historische- kritische Untersuchung.” Archiv für die Gesamte Psychologie; LVII Band. Leipzig: Akadamische Verlagsgesellschaft M.B.H. Pp. 165 – 301.

Marks, Lawrence E. 1997 (1975). “On colored-hearing synesthesia: cross-modal translations of sensory dimensions.” In S. Baron-Cohen and J. Harrison, eds.; Synaesthesia: classic and contemporary readings; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Reprinted from Psychological Bulletin; vol. 82(3): 303 – 331. Pp. 49 – 98.

Marwaha, Sonali Bhatt, and Edwin C. May. 2015. “Rethinking extrasensory perception: Toward a multiphasic model of precognition.” SAGE Open; January-March: 1 – 17.

Maurer, Daphne. 1997. “Neonatal synaesthesia: implications for the processing of speech and faces.” In S. Baron-Cohen and J. Harrison, eds.;

131

Synaesthesia: classic and contemporary readings; Oxford, England: Blackwell. Pp. 224 – 242.

Melara, Robert D. 1989a. “Dimensional interaction between color and pitch.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance; vol. 159(1): 69 – 79.

Melara, Robert D. 1989b. “Similarity relations among synesthetic stimuli and their attributes.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance; vol. 15(2): 212 – 231.

Mills, Carol Bergfeld, Edith Howell Boteler, and Glenda K. Oliver. 1999. “Digit synaesthesia: a case study using a Stroop-type test.” Cognitive Neuropsychology; vol. 16: 181 – 191.

Nabokov, Vladimir. 1966. Speak, memory: an autobiography revisited. New York: Putnam.

Nagel, Thomas. 1974. “What is it like to be a bat?” The Philosophical Review; Oct.; vol. 83.4: 435 – 450.

Nunn, J. A., Lloyd J. Gregory, Michael Brammer, Steven C. R. Williams, David M. Parslow, M. J. Morgan, R. G. Morris, E. T. Bullmore, Simon Baron- Cohen, and Jeffrey A. Gray. 2002. “Functional magnetic resonance imaging of synesthesia: activation of V4/V8 by spoken words.” Nature Neuroscience; vol. 5: 371 – 375.

Paffen, Chris L.E., Maarten J. Van der Smagt, and Tanja C.W. Nijboer. 2015. “Cross-modal, bidirectional priming in grapheme-color synesthesia.” Consciousness and Cognition; vol. 33: 325 – 333.

Papke, Roger L., Nicole A. Horenstein, and Clare Stokes. 2015. “Nicotinic Activity of Arecoline, the Psychoactive Element of ‘Betel Nuts’, Suggests a Basis for Habitual Use and Anti-Inflammatory Activity.” PLOS ONE; October 21; DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0140907.

Patrick, G. T. W. 1893. “Number forms.” Popular Science Monthly; vol. 42: 504 – 514.

Pierce, Arthur H. 1907. “Gustatory audition: a hitherto undescribed variety of synaesthesia.” American Journal of Psychology; vol. 18: 341 – 352.

Piesse, C.H. 1887. Olfactics and the physical senses. London: Piesse and Lubin.

Podoll, K., and D. Robinson. 2002. “Auditory-visual synaesthesia in a patient with basilar migraine.” Journal of Neurology; vol. 249: 476 – 477.

132

Pollard, John C., Leonard Uhr, and Elizabeth Stern. 1965. Drugs and phantasy: the effects of LSD, psilocybin, and sernyl on college students. Boston: Little, Brown.

Ponce de León, Marcia S., Lubov Golovanova, Vladimir Doronichev, Galina Romanova, Takeru Akazawa, Osamu Kondo, Hajime Ishida, and Christoph P. E. Zollikofer. 2008. “Neanderthal brain size at birth provides insights into the evolution of human life history.” PNAS; September 16; vol. 105(37): 13764 – 13768.

Quam, Rolf, and Yoel Rak. 2008. “Auditory ossicles from southwest Asian Mousterian sites.” Journal of Human Evolution; March; vol. 54(3): 414 – 433.

Raines, Thomas Hart. 1909. “Report of a case of psychochromesthesia.” Journal of Abnormal Psychology; vol. 4: 249 – 252.

Ramachandran, Vilayanur S., and David Brang. 2008. “Tactile-emotion synesthesia.” Neurocase; 14.5: 390 – 399.

Ramachandran, Vilayanur S., and Edward M. Hubbard. 2001a. “Psychophysical investigations into the neural basis of synaesthesia.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, B.; vol. 268: 979 – 983.

Ramachandran, Vilayanur S., and Edward M. Hubbard. 2001b. “Synaesthesia – a window into perception, thought and language.” Journal of Consciousness Studies; vol. 8(12): 3 – 34.

Ramachandran, Vilayanur S., and Edward M. Hubbard. 2003. “More common questions about synesthesia.” Scientific American; 14 April. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=more-common- questions-abo-2003-04-14

Ramachandran, Vilayanur S., Luke Miller, Margaret S. Livingstone, and David Brang. 2012. “Colored halos around faces and emotion-evoked colors: A new form of synesthesia.” Neurocase; vol. 18(4): 352 – 358.

Reichel-Dolmatoff, Geraldo. 1971. Amazonian cosmos: The sexual and religious symbolism of the Tukano Indians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Riccò, Dina. 1999. Sinestesie per il design . Le interazioni sensoriali nell’epoca dei multimedia. Milano: Etas, Milano.

Rich, Anina N., J.L. Bradshaw, and Jason B. Mattingley. 2005. “A systematic, large-scale study of synaesthesia: implications for the role of early experience in lexical-colour associations.” Cognition; vol. 98: 53 – 84.

133

Rich, LJ. 2014. “Hacking the instrument of the future in Boston.” BBC News, Technology; 19 April. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27067106

Riggs, Lorrin A., and Theodore Karwoski. 1934. “Synaesthesia.” British Journal of Psychology; vol. 25: 29 – 41.

Rivlin, Robert, and Karen Gravelle. 1984. Deciphering the senses. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Ronson, Jon. 2009. The men who stare at goats. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Rothen, Nicolas, Kristin Jünemann, Andy D. Mealor, Vera Burckhardt, and Jamie Ward. 2015. “The sensitivity and specificity of a diagnostic test of sequence-space synesthesia.” Behavior Research Methods; November; DOI: 10.3758/s13428-015-0656-2.

Rothen, Nicholas, and Beat Meier. 2010. “Higher prevalence of synaesthesia in art students.” Perception; vol. 39: 718 – 720.

Rouw, Romke, & H. Steven Scholte. 2007. “Increased structural connectivity in grapheme-color synesthesia.” Nature Neuroscience; June; 10.6: 792 – 797.

Rouw, Romke, and H. Steven Scholte. 2010. “Neural basis of individual differences in synesthetic experiences.” Journal of Neuroscience; May 5; vol. 30(18): 6205 – 6213.

Russell, Alex, Richard J. Stevenson, and Anina N. Rich. 2015. “Chocolate smells pink and stripy: Exploring olfactory-visual synesthesia.” Cognitive Neuroscience; vol. 6(2–3): 77 – 88.

Sachs, George T.L. 1812. Historiae naturalis duorum leucaetiopum: auctoris ipsius et sororis eius. Solisbaci: Sumptibus Bibliopolii Seideliani.

Sacks, Oliver. 1985. The man who mistook his wife for a hat, and other clinical tales. New York: Harper and Row.

Saenz, Melissa, and Christof Koch. 2008. “The sound of change: visually- induced auditory synesthesia.” Current Biology; 18.15: R650-R651.

Sagiv, Noam, and O. Ben-Tal. (forthcoming). “Nocturnal synesthesia.”

Sagiv, Noam, Julia Simner, James Collins, Brian Butterworth, and Jamie Ward. 2006. "What is the relationship between synaesthesia and visuo-spatial number forms?" Cognition; 101: 114 - 128.

Santana, Carlos. 2002. Shaman. New York: Arista Records.

134

Schele, Linda, and David Freidel. 1990. A forest of kings. New York: William Morrow.

Schmandt-Besserat, Denise. 1992. Before writing. Volume I: From counting to cuneiform. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Scriabin, Alexander. 1995 (1911). "Poem of Ecstasy" and "Prometheus: Poem of Fire". New York: Dover.

Seaberg, Maureen. 2011. Tasting the universe. Pompton Plains, NJ: New Pages Books.

Seron, Xavier, Mauro Pesenti, and Marie-Pascale Noël. 1992. “Images of numbers, or ‘When 98 is upper left and 6 sky blue’.” Cognition; vol. 44: 159 – 196.

Shanon, Benny. 2002. The antipodes of the mind. Oxford: University Press.

Sharer, Robert J., and Loa P. Traxler. 2006. The ancient Maya. Sixth edition. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Sidoroff-Dorso, Anton V. 2010. Justday is peach yellow: short-time dilation of synaesthesia; new approximations in the Oscillatory Supervenience Model of synaesthesia. Poster presented at the 2010 meeting of the UK Synaesthesia Association; 27 – 28 March; University of Sussex, Brighton, UK.

Simner, Julia, and Duncan A. Carmichael. 2015. “Is synaesthesia a dominantly female trait?” Cognitive Neuroscience; vol. 6(2-3): 68 – 76.

Simner, Julia, Jenny Harrold, Harriet Creed, Louise Monro and Loise Foulkes. 2009. “Early detection of markers for synaesthesia in childhood populations.” Brain, vol. 132: 57 – 64.

Simner, Julia, and Emma Holenstein. 2007. “Ordinal Linguistic Personification as a variant of synesthesia.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience; vol. 19(4): 694 – 703.

Simner, Julia, and Edward M. Hubbard. 2006. “Variants of synesthesia interact in cognitive tasks: evidence for implicit associations and late connectivity in cross-talk theories.” Neuroscience; vol. 143: 805 – 814.

Simner, Julia, Wan-Yu Hung, and Richard Shillcock. 2011. “Synaesthesia in a logographic language: the colouring of Chinese characters and Pinyin/Bopomo spellings.” Consciousness and Cognition; vol. 20: 1376 – 1392.

135

Simner, Julia, Catherine Mulvenna, Noam Sagiv, Elias Tsakanikos, Sarah A. Witherby, Christine Fraser, Kirsten Scott, and Jamie Ward. 2006. “Synaesthesia: the prevalence of atypical cross-modal experiences.” Perception; vol. 35: 1024 – 1033.

Simpson, Lorna, and Peter McKellar. 1955. “Types of synaesthesia.” Journal of Mental Science; vol. 101: 141 – 147.

Sinke, Christopher. John H. Halpern, Markus Zedler, Janina Neufeld, Hinderk M. Emrich, and Torsten Passie. 2012. “Genuine and drug-induced synesthesia: a comparison.” Consciousness and Cognition; vol. 21: 1419 – 1434.

Smilek, Daniel, Mike J. Dixon, Cera Cudahy, and Philip M. Merikle. 2001. “Synaesthetic photisms influence visual perception.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience; vol. 13.7: 930 – 936.

Smilek, Daniel, B.A. Moffatt, J. Pasternak, B.N. White, M.J. Dixon, and P.M. Merikle. 2002. “Synaesthesia: a case study of discordant monozygotic twins.” Neurocase; vol. 8: 338 – 342.

Sobczak-Edmans, Monika, and Noam Sagiv. 2013. “Chapter 12: Synesthetic personification: the social world of graphemes.” In J. Simner and E. Hubbard, eds.; The Oxford Handbook of Synaesthesia; Oxford: University Press. Pp. 222 – 238.

Spalding, J. M. K., and O. L. Zangwill. 1950. “Disturbance of number-form in a case of brain injury.” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgy and Psychiatry; vol. 13: 24 – 29.

Spence, Charles, and Betina Piqueras-Fiszman. 2014. The perfect meal: the multisensory science of food and dining. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.

Studerus, Erich, Alex Gamma, Michael Kometer, and Franz X. Vollenweider. 2012. “Prediction of psilocybin response in healthy volunteers.” PLoS ONE; Feb.; vol. 7(2): e30800.

Tomson, Steffie N., Nili Avidan, Kwanghyuk Lee, Anand K. Sarma, Rejnal Tushe, Dianna M. Milewicz, Molly Bray, Suzanne M. Leal, and David M. Eagleman. 2011. “The genetics of color sequence synesthesia: suggestive evidence of linkage to 16q and genetic heterogeneity for the condition.” Behavioural Brain Research; vol. 223: 48 – 52.

Ulrich, Alfred. 1903. “Phénomènes de synesthèsies chez un épileptique.” Revue Philosophique; vol. 56: 181 – 187.

136 van Leeuwen, Tessa M., Hanneke E. M. den Ouden, and Peter Hagoort. 2011. “Effective connectivity determines the nature of subjective experience in grapheme-color synesthesia.” Journal of Neuroscience; 6 July; vol. 31(27): 9879 – 9884.

Vike, Jean, Bahman Jabbari, and Charles G. Maitland. 1984. “Auditory-visual synesthesia: report of a case with intact visual pathways.” Archive of Neurology; June; vol. 41: 680 – 681. von Melchner, Laurie, Sarah L. Pallas, and Mriganka Sur. 2000. “Visual behaviour mediated by retinal projections directed to the auditory pathway.” Nature; 20 April; vol. 404: 871 – 876. von Uexküll, Baron Jakob. 1957 (1934). “A stroll through the worlds of animals and men: a picture book of invisible worlds.” In C. Schiller, ed.; Instinctive behavior: the development of a modern concept; New York: International UP. Pp. 5 – 80.

Ward, Jamie, and Julia Simner. 2003. “Lexical-gustatory synaesthesia: linguistic and conceptual factors.” Cognition; vol. 89: 237 – 261.

Ward, Jamie, Julia Simner, and Vivian Auyeung. 2005. “A comparison of lexical-gustatory and grapheme-colour synaesthesia.” Cognitive Neuropsychology; vol. 22(1): 28 – 41.

Ward, Jamie, Daisy Thompson-Lake, Roxanne Ely, and Flora Kaminski. 2008. “Synaesthesia, creativity and art: What is the link?” British Journal of Psychology; vol. 99: 127 - 141.

Ward, Jamie, Elias Tsakanikos, and Alice Bray. 2006. “Synaesthesia for reading and playing musical notes.” Neurocase; vol. 12: 27 – 34.

Weiss, Peter H., N. Jon Shah, Ivan Toni, Karl Zilles, and Gereon R. Fink. 2001. “Associating colours with people: a case of chromatic-lexical synaesthesia.” Cortex; vol. 37: 750 – 753.

Witthoft, Nathan, and Jonathan Winawer. 2006. “Synesthetic colors determined by having colored refrigerator magnets in childhood.” Cortex; vol. 42: 175 – 183.

Yaro, Caroline, and Jamie Ward. 2007. “Searching for Shereshevskii: What is superior about the memory of synaesthetes?” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology; vol. 60(5): 681 – 695.

Zamm, Anna, Gottfried Schlaug, David M. Eagleman, and Psyche Loui. 2013. “Pathways to seeing music: enhanced structural connectivity in colored- music synesthesia.” NeuroImage; vol. 74: 359 – 366.

137

Zeki, Semir. 1993. A vision of the brain. Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications.

Zhou, Wen, Xiaoying Yang, Kepu Chen, Peng Cai, Sheng He, and Yi Jiang. 2014. “Chemosensory communication of gender through two human steroids in a sexually dimorphic manner.” Current Biology; May 19; vol. 24, 1091 – 1095.

138

Index

Abilify, 106 Cyrillic, 25 acetaminophen, 105 Cytowic, Richard E., 3, 6, 9, 23 adderall, 105 diazepam, 106 adventitious synesthesia, 20 disinhibited feedback, 4, 43 alcohol, 105 drug-induced synesthesia, 16 alien color effect, 59 emotion  colors, 67 alphabet blocks, 26 emotion  flavor, 67 altered state of consciousness, 21 emotion  odor, 67 American Synesthesia Association, emotion  sound, 67 10 epilepsies, 2, 20, 21, 96 areca, 106 Feynman, Richard, 40, 49 arecoline, 106 flavor  temperature, 94 aripiprazole, 106 fluoxetine, 107 aspirin, 106 font, 32 associator, 7, 43, 44 FOXP2, 57 audition colorée, 2 Galton, Francis, 22 autism, 2 genetics, 5, 23 Baron-Cohen, Simon, 23 grapheme, 25, 30 Beach, Amy, 49 grapheme  flavor, 55 benzodiazapine, 106 grapheme  touch, 55 betel nut, 106 graphemes to colors, 4 bi-directionality, 11, 22 grey noise, 86 Blavatsky, Helena P., 81 hashish, 16, 107 blind, 26, 42 Hendrix, Jimi, 84 blind synesthete, 20 Homo erectus, 57 blue noise, 85 Homo ergaster, 57 Braille, 26, 42 hormones, 9 buproprion, 111 Hubbard, Edward M., 1, 8 caffeine, 107 hypnagogic synesthesia, 21 Cailliau, Sir Robert, 38 ideograph, 27 Chinese, 25, 27, 29 inducer, 2 chromosomes, 5, 6 Japanese, 27, 28, 32 clordiazepoxide, 106 Japanese hiragana, 26 codeine, 107 Japanese katakana, 25 color  grapheme, 34 kinetics  color, 97 color  taste, 100 kinetics  personification, 97 concurrent, 2 kinetics  sound, 97 congenital synesthesia, 5 lamotrigine, 108 consistency, 11 Lexeme  color, 58 cross activation, 43 lexico-gustemic synesthesia, 4 cross-activation theory, 4 Librium, 106 139 lithium, 108 punctuation marks, 30 LSD, 17, 21, 108 purple noise, 86 Mandarin, 28 Ramachandran, Vilayanur S., 8 marijuana, 16, 108 red noise, 85 Mayall, Rik, 21 refrigerator magnets, 26 melatonin, 16, 21, 108 Ritalin, 109 mescaline, 17 Scriabin, Alexander, 81 Messiaen, Olivier, 49 sensorial synesthesia, 1 methylphenidate, 109 Sernyl, 19 migraines, 2 serotonin, 21 monaesthetes, 5 sertraline hydrochloride, 110 music  temperature, 79 Sibelius, Jean, 85 music  visual, 24 Sidoroff-Dorso, Anton V., 63 musical sounds to colors, 4 Simner, Julia, 23 Nabokov, Vladimir, 37, 49 sodium valproate, 110 Nagel, Thomas, 11 sound  kinetics, 87 Neandertals, 57 sound  odor, 87 nicotine, 109 sound  temperature, 87 number  flavor, 34 sound  touch, 20, 87 odor  sound, 94 sound  visual, 20, 22 odor  temperature, 94 sounds to colors, 4 odor  touch, 94 Strattera, 109 Ordinal Linguistic Personification, Synesthesia Battery, 11, 47, 119 35, 36, 50, 133 Synesthesia List, 3 ordinal sequence synesthesia, 1 temperatures  color, 97 pain  flavor, 97 temperatures  sound, 97 pain  odor, 97 time  sound, 67 pain  sound, 97 time units to colors, 4 Pamuk, Orhan, 38 touch  color, 97 paroxetine, 109 touch  emotion, 97 Paxil, 109 touch  odor, 97 PCP, 19 touch  sound, 97 personality  flavor, 102 touch  temperature, 97 personality  odor, 67, 102 Tourette’s Syndrome, 97 personality  touch, 67 trance, 21 peyote, 17 trends, 47 phantom limbs, 2 twins, 23, 26 phoneme, 25 uni-directionality, 11 phoneme  color, 58 Valium, 106 pink noise, 85 venlafaxine, 110 prednisone, 109 violet noise, 86 proguanil, 109 vision  kinetics, 102 projector, 7, 8, 43, 44 vision  odor, 102 Prometheus, 81 vision  temperature, 102 propranolol, 110 vision  touch, 102 Prozac, 107 von Uexküll, Baron Jakob, 11 psilocybin, 19 Vyvanse, 110

140

Wannerton, James, 58 white noise, 85 Wellbutrin, 111 Zoloft, 110

141

142

About the author

Sean A. Day holds a B.A. and an M.A. in Anthro- pology, and a Ph.D. in Linguistics. He is the founder and moderator of the Synesthesia List, begun in 1992. He was instrumental in developing the American Synesthesia Association as a nonprofit organization, assisted in organizing ASA confer- ences, and served as the ASA President from 2000 to 2016. In 2016, he helped form the International Association of Synaesthetes, Artists, and Scientists (IASAS), and serves as its President. A multiple syn-esthete himself, he has given talks about synesthesia in numerous different forums around the world, including in Taiwan, Russia, and Spain, and has been featured in documentaries on synesthesia presented in such countries as Australia, Ecuador, Japan, the Netherlands, and the UK, as well as in the US and Canada. (Photo by Jasmin Sinha)

All pictures, charts and diagrams in this volume are either the property of the author, or are in public domain.

143